Older Buildings Research (OBR) Professional Engineering Expert Advice Role

The Department for Education (DfE) requires further specialist technical services from an existing supplier to support the final phase of the Older Building Research (OBR) project. The OBR project has already been procured and a consortium bid was successful; of which the supplier was a party, fulfilling the Engineering Expert role as a subcontractor to the prime supplier.

This supplier is Useful Simple Group Limited. Through the OBR project, the DfE is investigating, cataloguing and extrapolating the condition of the post-war education estate, including through onsite intrusive investigations.

This research project will enable the DfE to improve its understanding of the post-war education estate. This work is underpinned by a bespoke risk model, designed using research and investigations conducted to date and based on the technical assumptions and interpretative approach applied by the Engineering Expert Advice role.

The project requires a further final phase not originally included in the contract with the prime supplier successful in the original procurement. This final phase involves interpreting and enhancing fieldwork inputs for model development, support on Large Language Model (LLM) workflows to support LLM development, providing engineering-led interpretation of fieldwork findings to enhance model relevance and insight, and applying the already established fieldwork approach across up to six additional schools, developing proposals for alternative methodologies to enhance data quality and fieldwork insights.

To ensure continuity and compatibility with the research and model developed to date, the services under this additional appointment must be delivered by the supplier who fulfilled the Engineering Expert Advice role in the original procurement and using the same technical assumptions and interpretative approach previously developed by them and applied. This consistency is essential; the model and supporting analysis have been built incrementally as a single coherent system.

Introducing outputs based on different assumptions and knowledge base would require significant re-engineering and re-validation of existing work, creating disproportionate technical complexity and undermining the integrity of the model. The appointed supplier will provide engineering-led interpretation of the above scope to integrate new data into the current risk model without compromising its structure or functionality. These services will enable the DfE to maintain a consistent technical approach, ensuring that new findings complement and strengthen the existing evidence.