Psychometric Testing and Assessment Services

Introduction

Essex County Council are currently undertaking the build of a Digital Vocational Tool. This tool will primarily be used to support Children and Young People (CYP) with Special Educational Needs (SEND), although in time this may be used for the wider education cohorts. To support this, we are seeking the provision of psychometric testing and related assessment services. This service would primarily be used in educational settings, however there will also be a requirement for this to be used by parents for Children and Young People with SEND educated at home. It is therefore imperative that the tools can be used by a range of persons not only accredited professionals.

ECC is undertaking this Preliminary market engagement notice (PME) to engage with potential suppliers to understand market capability and available solutions to help develop the Authority's requirements and inform the procurement strategy.

This notice serves to alert the market and invite expressions of interest ahead of a planned tender process.

Background and Purpose

The purpose of this PME is to support early market engagement with suppliers who can provide robust, validated, and reliable psychometric assessment tools to support children and young people with SEND identify and articulate their strengths, interests, personality traits, transferable skills, experiences, preferred working style, support needs and aspirations in a way which supports their learning needs, and matches these to job types and local relevant pathways in Essex. ECC is looking to learn more about tools which offer a range of components.

The resulting digital profile should be accessible, inclusive and developmentally appropriate enabling young people to understand themselves as learners and future workers. It should meaningfully inform education, employment and training pathways by matching individual profiles to realistic job roles, local labour market opportunities and progression routes within Essex whilst supporting personalised planning, transitions and engagement with employment opportunities.

The digital profile should have the ability to update and track progress and changing aspirations.

Components which have been defined as critical are:-

• Adaptive strengths - based Personality and preference assessments that identify how a young person is likely to experience and interact with learning and work environments.
• Cognitive ability and aptitude testing used to identify learning styles, processing preferences and suitable task types.
• Strengths profile including talents, soft skills, experiences and working style combined with areas for development
• Inclusive situational judgement tests that explore how young people respond to realistic workplace and learning scenarios.
• Creative options such as gamified aspects of the solution that enhance engagement and accessibility. Career, job‑type and local pathway matching, using assessment outputs to align individual strengths, preferences, support needs and aspirations to realistic employment sectors, job roles and education or training pathways relevant to the local labour market in Essex.
• All feedback should be age appropriate and SEND informed.

Support profile Components which have been defined as helpful but not imperative include:

• Accredited feedback or coaching services linked to results.
• Situational judgement tests

The aim is to understand current market capability, innovation, price points and delivery models before shaping a formal procurement approach.

Scope of the Required Service

The anticipated future contract may cover:

• Access to online psychometric testing platforms
• Associated licensing, support and maintenance model, with suppliers asked to provide indicative pricing based on up to 1,000 young people having a digital profile created over a 12‑month period.
• Volumes may vary and no minimum usage commitment is implied at this stage.
• Customisable reporting outputs (individual and aggregated)
• Administrative dashboards
• Provision of an API that can be exposed, via Azure APIM, for consumption by an in-house component. The API needs to provide functionality to allow the component full access to the systems resources, via ad-hoc searches or predefined methods
• Data protection, security and GDPR compliance
• Technical Customer assistance
• A pre-recorded demonstration of the tools which can be viewed by users

The exact specification will be refined following the market engagement phase.

Estimated Timescales

• PME and market engagement release: May 2026
• Market engagement sessions: Summer 2026
• Formal procurement launch (if applicable): Summer 2026
• Contract start date: Approx September 2026 with service mobilised by January 2027

These timescales are provisional and may be subject to change.