Contract award

Department for Education awards two school pre-construction agreements

By Staff Writer  |  22 August 2026

The Department for Education has published two contract award notices confirming pre-construction services agreements at two schools. Mclaren Construction Limited is named on the notice for St James Daisy Hill, Church of England Primary School. Tilbury Douglas Construction Limited is named on the notice for Bishop Walsh Catholic School. Both notices were published on 21 August 2026 and both record contracts signed that day.

Each notice states that the award relates to a two-stage public works contract and confirms that a pre-construction services agreement has been awarded under the department's construction framework, reference CF25. Each states that the contract price and expiry date given in the notice reflect solely the estimated amount to be paid to the contractor under the early supplier involvement phase, and that both the price and the expiry date are subject to confirmation following progression to detailed design and final agreement of the works under a design and build contract.

The recorded figures are 20,000,000 pounds for the St James Daisy Hill project, with a contract period running to 13 May 2030, and 50,000,000 pounds for the Bishop Walsh project, running to 15 December 2031. Because each notice states that the price shown reflects only the early supplier involvement phase, and because each figure is nevertheless recorded against the whole contract, neither is treated here as a settled contract sum.

The descriptive wording on the two notices is word for word identical, including the sentence describing the scheme in each case as the design and build or refurbishment of a mainstream primary school. The Bishop Walsh notice carries an additional transparency statement recording that the redacted pre-construction services agreement attached to the notice reflects the early supplier involvement stage of the contracting process, and that the final contract price and expiry date will be confirmed on agreement of the detailed design.

Three notices were published on the St James Daisy Hill reference between 15:12 and 16:01 on 21 August 2026. The first recorded a different contractor as the supplier. The second and third, published 21 and 49 minutes later, record Mclaren Construction Limited. The later notices are the operative record.

What the practitioner should take from this

The first point is the value, and it is the sort of figure that gets lifted into a benchmarking exercise and then quoted back years later as though it were a contract sum. It is not. The department has said, on the face of both notices, that the price shown reflects only the early supplier involvement phase and is subject to confirmation. A pre-construction services agreement buys design development, buildability advice, programme work and price build up. It does not buy the building. Anyone comparing these figures against a completed scheme is comparing two different things.

The second point is what a two-stage arrangement actually commits the parties to. The first stage secures the contractor's involvement and, usually, an obligation to work up a target or a lump sum. It rarely commits either party to proceed to the second stage. The provisions that matter are the ones nobody reads at signature: what happens to the design if the parties do not agree a price, who owns the contractor's design development work, whether that design is licensed for use by a replacement contractor, and what the client pays if it walks away. Those provisions sit in the pre-construction services agreement, which is the document signed here, and not in the design and build contract, which is not yet in place.

The third point is the recorded expiry dates. Neither is a construction completion date. The department has said they are subject to confirmation, and the periods recorded, running to 2030 and to 2031, are long for an early involvement phase. They should be read as the outer boundary of the whole two-stage arrangement rather than as a programme.

The fourth point is the identical descriptive wording across two different schools. Standard text is efficient, and it is also how a description ends up describing something the project is not. A notice description is not a contractual document, but it is the record a bidder or a later reviewer reads first, and a discrepancy is better corrected than left on the public record.

The fifth point is the sequence of three notices on one reference within fifty minutes, with a different contractor named on the first. A notice read on the day of publication may not be the final version, and the safe practice, before acting on any award notice, is to check whether a later notice on the same reference has superseded it.

No design team, no subcontractor and no start on site date is published on either notice, and none is stated here.