New, improved apprenticeship training marketplace coming soon

8 Feb 2021 12:53 PM

It’s National Apprenticeship Week and we’ll soon be launching enhancements to our apprenticeship training marketplace to make buying the right training for your apprentices quicker and simpler.

About the marketplace

The marketplace will help you use your apprenticeship levy funds to access training solutions and meet your statutory apprenticeship targets. 

The electronic filtering system makes it simple to find suitable Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) registered apprenticeship training and end-point assessment suppliers. Suppliers can join or update their service offering at any time.

You will also be safe in the knowledge that you are compliant with both public procurement and ESFA funding rules.

Coming soon

We’ll soon be launching a more intuitive system to help users that don’t have procurement experience. You will find guidance and workflow prompts to help you at each stage of the buying process.

The system will tell you how many suppliers meet your criteria as you add filters, helping you refine your search accordingly. 

You will have the option to conduct a fully digitised end to end transaction, including desktop evaluation of suppliers, completing the order form and contract terms, digitally signing contracts and sending them to the supplier.

The system’s flexibility will mean you can also take the process offline at any stage, if you prefer. For example, you might want to run your further competition offline and / or complete the contract documents offline, if that suits your governance requirements better.  

Whichever option you choose, you can automatically publish your contract awards to Contract Finder. This is a requirement for all contracts over £10,000 for transparency.

You can also assign users different roles, so that activities can be completed by specific individuals based on their role in the procurement process. This can be useful if, for example, you need sign-off before you put the contract in place. 

Empowering you to make better buying decisions

These enhancements have all been designed to make buying apprenticeship training quicker and simpler.

We’re creating a recorded webinar to walk you through using the marketplace to help you get started. 

 Fill in our online form mentioning ‘apprenticeship training webinar’ in the subject box, if you would like to be updated when the improvements are live and be sent a copy of the recorded webinar,

You can also call us on 0345 410 2222 or email info@crowncommercial.gov.uk