SIF 3 Developer Framework: Functional Services

The Department for Education (DfE) is responsible for education and children’s services in England. It works to achieve a highly educated society in which opportunity is equal for children and young people, no matter what their background or family circumstances.

DfE is a ministerial department, supported by nine agencies and public bodies. The current DfE vision is to ‘provide world-class education and care that allows every child and young person to reach his or her potential, regardless of background’.

The role of data in achieving this vision is to: • support the department to deliver world-class data-driven policy; • improve decision-making and accountability across the education sector through release of data and publication of high quality performance information, statistics, evaluations, research and analysis; • help parents to make informed choices and support Ministers to hold schools to account and to drive up standards. To deliver this vision, data movement to the Department for Education must be modernised.

Prototyping will begin on new systems for data collection – in 2016. The new data exchange system will use Information Standards Board (ISB) enterprise, canonical business data architecture as the data language and the Access for Learning (A4L) SIF 3 Framework as the transport layer.

The department will prototype SIF 3 ‘functional services’ and if successful these will be included in the SIF 3 Developer Framework for use in the UK. This will enable any supplier that supports UK end-users to develop their own SIF 3 adapters.

Through this competition, DfE wants to find a supplier who can develop the functional services part of the SIF 3 Developer Framework in .NET and JAVA (this should be developed for both SIF Direct & SIF Brokered environments). All developments will be made freely available to the education marketplace via the appropriate A4L resource channel (i.e. SIF Association GitHub repository).

A full ‘Developer Guide’ will also be required to accompany the SIF 3 Developer Framework, which will be made freely available on the A4L website. Both code and documentation will be quality reviewed by the A4L UK and International Technical Boards before sign off.

Answers applicable to all tenderers will be published on contract finder by 5pm (GMT), 23rd February 2016. Please send your tenders to DMU.SIF@education.gsi.gov.uk