Swindon Academy is part of United Learning Trust. The Academy prides itself on providing a safe, clean and secure environment for all students and staff across its two sites in Swindon:
- Beech Avenue – an all through school 2-19 yrs including Beech Trees nursery
- Alton Close – a Primary school including nursery & Hillview community building
The Background
- The existing cleaning contract was coming up to the end of its ”initial term” and the Academy was not keen to extend with the incumbent contractor.
- The renewal came with a requirement to run a process compliant with the Public Contracts Regulations 2015.
- Having previously used Minerva for a previous tender Swindon Academy appointed us once again to support them.
- The Academy wanted to focus on the role and hours of the Housekeeper for each site, and an awareness around recruitment being a challenge in the Academy’s location, including contingency for staff absences, were key factors they wanted to bring out in the tender process.
- Both sites had a requirement for external window cleaning to include the internal glass balustrades.
- The successful contractor needed to support the Academy’s emphasis on the use of eco-friendly chemicals wherever possible.
- The process was run as a two-stage “Restricted Procedure” commencing with the initial Selection Questionnaire (SQ) stage. This was followed by an Invitation to Tender (ITT) stage whereby five bidders were shortlisted from the SQ stage.
Results
In total twelve cleaning contractors submitted aa SQ response and of those shortlisted to the ITT stage all five bidders submitted a complete bid.
From those five, three suppliers were invited to a presentation day with a representative from Minerva facilitating as well as Academy representatives on the panel. Weston Support Services were awarded the contract.
Minerva’s support included:
- drafting and issuing the tender documents
- hosting the tender on In-tend (our e-procurement platform)
- draft scoring the SQ submissions prior to moderation by the Academy
- organising and attending the site visit
- draft scoring the ITT submissions prior to moderation by the Academy
- provision of detailed financial analysis on all contract elements with a specific focus on the all-important labour costs
- organisation and attendance at the presentation day
- all compliance requirements including provision of a detailed Procurement Audit Report
Customer Feedback
Glynn Porter, Swindon Cluster Estates Manager said of the SQ Stage (Selection Questionnaire) “This is indeed an excellent tool to complete the weighted scoring process and is very useful & informative.”
Similarly, when referring to the ITT Stage (Invitation to Tender) “there was quite a lot of detail to go through so thank you for setting this out in an easy-to-understand format, which should make our decision-making process so much easier”.
And of the process overall “I would like to thank you and your team for getting this completed in time for the planned start date. We certainly could not have done this without your knowledge, patience, expertise & guidance so thank you so much.”
