Contract Management for Schools & MATs

Usually yes.

A standalone school still holds, on average, twenty or thirty supplier agreements, and they’re typically spread between the business manager, the site team and whoever originally set them up. 

The register is designed to keep knowledge local and centralised, meaning that if someone leaves, knowledge doesn’t leave with them. 

Because the obligations sit with the trust, not with each school separately.

Under the Procurement Act 2023, spend is assessed across the whole trust rather than school by school. Three schools each spending £90,000 a year on cleaning is £270,000 of cleaning spend at trust level, and that’s the figure measured against the procurement thresholds. Plenty of trusts are above threshold in a category without realising, purely because nobody has added the schools together.

The contract usually just carries on. Most agreements roll over automatically unless you give notice, and that notice is often due three to six months before the end date, which is exactly why it gets missed.

Once it’s renewed, you’re committed for another term on existing terms, and you’ve lost the one moment where the supplier had a reason to sharpen their pricing. Sometimes there’s still a way out. More often you pay for the oversight until the next window comes round.

No. Strategy is how you decide what to buy and how you buy it. Contract management is the three or five years afterwards; it’s the supplier delivering, the price changing as agreed, when does it end, and are we starting early enough to have any leverage.

Most schools and trusts want both eventually. 

Yes, or we can run them alongside your team, or hand you the framework and let you run them yourselves. Most clients pick the middle option, since it keeps the supplier relationship with you while building the habit internally.

Either way, it’s a structured conversation against agreed standards with a written record.

A few weeks in most cases.

The build itself is straightforward. Collecting the contracts is the slower part, and it usually involves a fair amount of polite chasing, particularly across a trust. That exercise tends to be revealing in itself; the contracts nobody can find are often the ones worth looking at hardest.