24 Kent has adapted the standard BSF approach:
■ It asked two bidders to design seven schools before selecting the LST/Northgate consortium as its preferred bidder, with a further four school designs developed by the consortium before financial close. Normally two or three sample school designs would be developed up to financial close. Increasing this number will speed up the delivery of those schools and does not appear to have greatly increased the time spent in negotiation. However, it has significantly increased the cost to the Local Authority and bidders, and bidders report that its cost placed unsustainable strain on their bidding capacity and hinted that they would not be willing to bid again on those conditions.
■ It set up a 'Secondary Transformation Team', a team of former school heads and leaders who provide advice to schools on curriculum and design issues as part of their BSF planning. This has helped to align school expectations and plans with Kent's overall BSF objectives.
■ It employed the architecture firm Gensler to provide draft designs for its schools before inviting companies to compete to form its first LEP. Our school focus group told us that these designs helped them develop their ideas, but the bidders told us they were not useful as initial stage drawings as they chose to start again when producing their bids.
25 Kent believes the procurement of the LEP went well overall, but:
■ Kent experienced seven months delay in the last stage of its competitive dialogue process. PfS suggest that the period between selecting a final bidder and signing contracts should last four months (19 weeks) to clarify and confirm commitments in the final tender. Kent was one of the early adopters of the competitive dialogue procurement process. They believe that the market did not fully appreciate the impact of this change in procurement process.
■ Kent has on occasion thought that it had negotiated better terms from the contractors than the standard documents, but had difficulty in getting PfS to allow changes. PfS seeks to standardise terms and conditions to achieve economies of scale over the whole programme.