Opportunity Details

Birmingham City Council, Children and Families Directorate are inviting ‘Partners’ to help us deliver our CWGLEF funded Find Your Future Career programme to young people aged 14 to 19 who are part of our Virtual School. Activity will need to be delivered between 1 January to 31 March 2025.

Background

Birmingham continues to face many economic and social challenges whilst also being the youngest city in Europe with under 25s making up 40% of the population.

Unemployment remains high. The unadjusted youth unemployment rate increased to 15.7% in November 2024, with the youth claimant proportion increasing to 10.4%. Unadjusted youth unemployment rates increased in WMCA (13.6%) and for the UK as a whole (8.2%) in November. Unemployment briefings | Birmingham City Council

Birmingham City Council’s CWGLEF funded projects aim to provide delivery and support to residents, with an emphasis on increasing their pathways to jobs and skills.

Find Your Future Career is a Regional Careers Programme for 14–19-year-olds. It aims to aid Not in Employment, Education or Training (NEET) prevention for young people and cover gaps in careers support.

‘Find Your Future Career’ is a series of careers programme interventions - which will offer support to young people in Birmingham, aged 14 to 19 who are not receiving careers advice due to their personal circumstances “Birmingham’s Virtual School”: such as elective home educated, teenage parents, no school place, young people in care and care leavers, young people with SEN (with & without an EHCP), missing in education and newly arrived. It will provide a valuable, varied service to the young people involved in the project so they gain support, knowledge, guidance and skills to determine options and choices for their next steps at key transition points.

The careers programme offer of several separate interventions will include:

• ‘Have a go’ careers activities, support and visits to careers events

• Workshops, mentoring, well-being, life skills, engagement activities, careers counselling, and access to resources that help young people navigate their career paths effectively
• Interactions with employers, education and training providers

• Onward exploration of various career options and personal interests

Intervention Theme 7: quotations up to a maximum of £50,000 (excluding VAT)

To help us deliver ‘Find Your Future Career’, we are seeking the delivery of a dedicated support programme for at least 250 young people aged 14 to 19 (academic year 9 to 13) that are part of the Birmingham Virtual School (as described above).

The support programme should provide a series of sessions/workshops for groups of ‘Virtual School’ young people to attend (some possibly accompanied by a parent or carer) that are tailored to provide:

• ‘have a go’ careers activities,

• Information about the careers opportunities and routeways to enter them,

• interview/assessment centre scenarios,

• careers information, advice and guidance, including providing awareness of the education / training / employers and employment expectations,

• interaction with employers and providers offering courses or training at key transition points,

• opportunities to continue engagement with Birmingham Careers Service for support,

• other life skills and opportunities that provide the young people with preparation and an ability to continue considering their careers choices or their next steps,

Tenders should be from sole providers, SME organisations or other stakeholders.

To apply a ‘Partner’ will need to:

• Have a track record of successfully delivering externally funded programmes aimed at supporting relevant young people.

• Have experience of delivery in Birmingham (as we want to work with organisations that have a good understanding of and/or are representative of our local communities).

• Have its own constitution and bank account.

• Have delivery staff involved that are DBS checked and can carry out risk assessments in preparation for the delivery.

• Anticipate that a Data Sharing Agreement will be put in place as part of the Grant Agreement.

(a) Tendering and Assessment Process
We are seeking written tenders and quotations from ‘Partners’ which set out:

• What their delivery proposal is, how it relates to the intervention theme and how it supports the relevant young people aged 14-19 on their support pathway or with direct careers related activities. Please provide your organisation contact details and details of the delivery proposal including: who, what, how, where, why and when in your proposal, as well as the intended benefits.

• Cost of delivery (up to a maximum of £50,000 (excluding VAT))

• Intended impact: numbers of young people engaged, outputs and outcomes

Tenders will be assessed to ensure proposals meet the required criteria to receive funding; and scored by an internal panel.

Scoring will be weighted on:

• the ability of the proposal to deliver outputs and outcomes,

• the credibility of the delivery,
• the ability to deliver within the 1 January to 31 March 2025 timescale set,

• value for money, and

• geographical coverage for the delivery proposal.

We ask that you complete and return a brief (max 4 pages) written tender application, to tell us the details about your proposal to help us deliver our Find Your Future Career Intervention Theme 7. A CWGLEF application form is also provided.

(b) What you need to know, before you apply

• All proposals funded through CWGLEF must be completed, including all monitoring, by 31 March 2025.

This is a non-negotiable deadline and spend and activity after this will be ineligible.

• Grants available under this tender call can only be used to fund revenue expenditure.

• It is not eligible to claim VAT if the proposal is led by an organisation registered for VAT (and this can therefore be reclaimed separately from HMRC). VAT should not be accounted for in this circumstance in your proposed budget, nor expected to be reclaimed.

• Funding via this call is proposed to be grants. As such, Subsidy Control rules will apply.

Please familiarise yourself with these. We are on hand to discuss how to navigate this.

• Branding and publicity are an essential component of CWGLEF and the requirements for logos of partners, etc is non-negotiable.

• Successful providers will be requested to support the completion (and submit in a timely manner) CWGLEF participant documentation for all young people supported with this funding.

• Grant Agreements will be set up with successful applicants. Grant payments will be made before 31 March 2025 following evidence of delivery and claims made to BCC.

(c) Application Submission Details & Deadline:
If you are interested in applying for the Intervention Theme 7, please complete a written tender (as described above) and submit this to:

Maria Lopez at Maria.Lopez@birmingham.gov.uk
CC.Hannah Redfern at Hannah.Redfern@birmingham.gov.uk

by the deadline of: 11:00pm on Friday 24 JANUARY 2025

We aim to complete tender assessments within 7 days and notify successful applicants via email.