Skill Tenders and Contracts

Skills tenders take four recurring shapes. Funded delivery, where a provider is paid to teach against an adult skills allocation. Skills Bootcamps, the short sector-specific courses commissioned regionally. Digital and technology skills programmes, often bought as licences or platforms rather than teaching. And diagnostic work: skills audits, skills matrix tooling and capability assessments, which are smaller contracts but a reasonable way in for consultancies.

Stotles brings together skills tenders and contracts from 100+ portals into one search, so you do not have to check each portal separately, and you can set alerts for new opportunities across the UK and Ireland.

If you want to search the government portals directly, Find a Tender carries higher-value contracts across the UK and Contracts Finder carries lower-value contracts in England. Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales and eTendersNI cover Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, Ireland's eTenders covers Irish public bodies, and many councils, NHS bodies and housing associations publish on their own e-tendering portals such as ProContract. Adult skills delivery is mostly commissioned through light touch frameworks and further competitions run by combined authorities and councils holding devolved adult skills budgets.

Providers of funded adult learning must meet Ofsted inspection requirements and the funding rules attached to the adult skills budget, and staff working with vulnerable learners need DBS checks. Tenders usually set minimum insurance cover, check financial standing and ask for evidence of similar services at selection stage. Under the Procurement Act 2023, suppliers can be excluded for certain criminal convictions, insolvency or failure to pay tax.

Further education colleges and training providers are the delivery market, but the buying is mostly done by mayoral combined authorities and unitary councils holding devolved adult skills budgets, and central government departments commissioning workforce programmes. Prison education and armed forces apprenticeships show up as separate buying routes with their own purchasing systems.

Read adult skills strategies, local skills improvement plans, devolved funding allocations and expiry dates for existing provider frameworks, which show skills work coming due ahead of a notice. On Stotles you can track those signals and the buyers behind them, then follow a notice from pre-tender through to award.

Skill notices carry 80000000 (Education and training services) and 80400000 (Adult and other education services). Coding is loose in practice: plenty of digital skills buys come through IT and consultancy codes instead.