Court action preceded Tees Valley’s skills delay

A mayoral authority has indefinitely paused a £21 million adult education procurement after a training provider hit it with legal action.

Tees Valley Combined Authority (TVCA) began a fresh tender for adult skills funding in January – with contracts set to begin this August and run for three years.

But on April 15 officials took the unusual step of “temporarily” pausing the procurement without explanation.

The north-east authority’s procurement team told providers involved in the bidding stage of the process that a new timeline would be provided “in due course”.

FE Week has now learned that Learning Curve Group and two of the company’s subsidiaries filed a legal claim against the combined authority at the Technology and Construction Court, which handles public procurement disputes, on April 13 – two days before the delay announcement.

A spokesperson for TVCA said the authority was unable to comment due to the live procurement process. They did not respond when asked for a second time whether the procurement process was delayed due to the legal action.

Learning Curve Group, which is understood to have submitted a stage-one bid for a Tees Valley adult education contract, also said it would be inappropriate to comment.

The action comes a year after Learning Curve, based in County Durham, reached a secret financial settlement with the Department for Education following a legal dispute over losing out on a national adult education budget contract in 2023.

Negotiations

Tees Valley’s £21 million tender will cover at least three years from 2026-27, with an option to extend for a further year.

According to documents published by TVCA, the procurement process is being conducted through a “competitive flexible procedure” in three stages.

Stage one focuses on whether providers meet compliance requirements, while stage two will assess the quality of detailed tender submissions.

Stage three will involve face-to-face negotiations over costs and delivery plans.

The stage two clarification deadline, which came shortly after providers’ tenders were submitted, was planned for March 20. But on March 30 the combined authority said the submission deadline was “extended” until April 9.

After pausing the whole procurement on April 15, an update was issued on April 29 where the authority said a new deadline would be communicated to bidders “in due course”. Contract winners were due to be announced on June 10.

Grant funding returns

The combined authority last procured its adult skills contracts in 2021, for a period of three years with an extension up to July 2025.

Winners of the 2021 procurement included Learning Curve, Realise Learning & Employment Limited, Think Employment and Back 2 Work Complete Training.

Tees Valley, run by Conservative mayor Ben Houchen, is thought to be the only combined authority to have forced FE colleges and local authorities to bid for adult education funding alongside independent training providers, rather than offering them grants.

TVCA further extended the contracts won under the previous procurement for a one-year “call off” period in 2025-26, hoping to receive a more flexible multi-year “single pot” budget from the government, known as an integrated settlement.

However, the government refused to agree to single pot funding due to an ongoing “best-value notice” placed on the authority over governance concerns.

The notice, which remains in place, relates to an investigation into concerns about “corruption, wrongdoing and illegality” around its management of a large brownfield site.

TVCA has now decided to revert to the standard adult skills fund (ASF) allocations process of grant funding colleges and local authorities, while only running a tender for independent training providers.

For the next academic year, TVCA has a £30.5 million ASF budget and £2.7 million in free courses for jobs funding.

The £7 million-per-year in contracts for independent training providers would account for about one third of the combined authority’s adult skills funding.