DfE Awards £19 Million Joint Contracts to Scrumconnect Consulting and Aire Logic

Scrumconnect Consulting and Aire Logic have announced two joint contracts with the Department for Education (DfE) worth more than £19 million. The projects will support the Government’s Budget pledge to invest £1.4 billion of capital investment in the renovation and modernisation of schools across the UK.

Increasing digital maturity

A two-year contract worth £16.25 million will see Scrumconnect Consulting and Aire Logic help increase digital maturity across DfE’s Operations Infrastructure Group (OIG). As well as upskilling staff, the two companies will work alongside the OIG’s software developers, testers, architects and DevOps staff to design, build, maintain and run digital services, enabling schools and education authorities to access DfE support services more easily.

The project will focus on four key initiatives:

Get Help Buying for Schools (GHBS): A procurement programme focused on supporting schools to acquire non-staff goods and services more efficiently.
Schools Technology Services (STS): A programme focused on helping schools increase their digital maturity by having the right solutions, capability and strategy to implement technology effectively and safely.

Schools Account: A digital hub that helps to reduce workload burdens on school leaders and school business professionals find information about DfE support, services, data collection and other requirements.

Sustainability and Education Estates Digital Services: A service that supports billion-pound construction programmes by enabling educational institutions with the greatest need to renovate physical infrastructure to submit multiple funding applications.

MORE access to data

A second two-year project worth £3.1 million will see Scrumconnect and Aire Logic working with the DfE’s Advanced Analytics Division to develop its Modernising our Reporting Environment (MORE) programme.

The initiative aims to make the sharing of data more efficient for education institutions. This will see existing infrastructure and platforms migrated to the cloud, and a new self-service data tool being built from scratch. The project has four key areas, each of which will focus on user centred design to ensure ease of use by schools and education authorities:

The Further Education Data Warehouse: Scrumconnect Consulting and Aire Logic will collaborate with DfE’s Data Directorate to help improve access to data for staff at further education institutions. The project will see DfE’s data warehouse migrated to Microsoft Azure, to help make future updates and integrations more efficient.

View Your Education Data (VYED) infrastructure: This platform plays a crucial role in education institutions’ reporting and decision-making in areas such as school attendance. Scrumconnect Consulting and Aire Logic will modernise the platform so that it can run on Microsoft Azure, helping to improve collaboration and the sharing of data.

VYED download tool: The VYED download tool enables education professionals to query data that is vital to operations, download it and use it locally to inform strategy. The existing tool will be refactored to ensure it runs efficiently on the new Azure infrastructure.

Self-Service Data Query Tool: This will be an entirely new solution that empowers education professionals to pull data from the Further Education Data Warehouse. The tool will be based on the detailed analysis of user requirements and will use data science to drive decision-making.
 
“It’s vital that education institutions have the tools to make effective data-led decisions,” says Mark Duncan, Chief Digital Officer at Scrumconnect Consulting. “We’re excited to be partnering with Aire Logic to bring our expertise in user centred design to these important DfE projects. This will enable DfE to build better digital services and user journeys and put vital data in the hands of education professionals.”

"Supporting education in the UK through technology solutions is an increasingly critical part of both the Government’s and our own mission,” says Joe Waller, co-founder at Aire Logic. “As two like-minded companies with a history of success in modernising the public sector, we’re perfectly positioned to deliver solutions that match the Government’s ambitions around innovation and creating digital services that deliver in the long-term.”

About Scrumconnect Consulting

Scrumconnect Consulting is a leading UK technology consultancy committed to enriching the public sector by making government digital services easy to use for all citizens.

With a dedicated and highly experienced team, the firm offers full life cycle design, development and support of client-specific solutions that deliver excellence, efficiency and value.

For more information about Scrumconnect Consulting and its services, please visit www.scrumconnect.com.

About Aire Logic

Aire Logic is an employee-owned tech for good consultancy, that provides digital expertise to some of the largest programmes in the UK public sector. As one of the UK’s largest B Corp consultancies its mission is to deliver positive change through cutting edge technology. It only partners with culturally aligned organisations who share that same goal.