The new PE and School Sport Partnerships Network: what the tender tells us
The new PE and School Sport Partnerships Network: what the tender tells us
An update for Headteachers and PE Leads
On the 17th of July the Department for Education published its invitation to tender for a National Delivery Partner to establish and deliver the new PE and School Sport Partnerships Network across England. Bids close at midday on the 25th September, with an award decision expected on the 25th November.
We have had statements of intent about the future of PE funding for a while now. This is the first document that puts numbers, dates and delivery expectations in one place, so it is worth understanding even though schools are not the ones bidding.
Here is what the notice says and what it is likely to mean for you.
One national partner, local delivery
The DfE is appointing a single organisation to lead the whole thing. That partner takes responsibility for the strategic leadership, design, implementation and operational delivery of the network. Beneath that sits the local layer: the notice describes flexible local support for schools, peer-to-peer learning, co-ordinated CPD and stronger school-to-club links.
If that structure sounds familiar, it should. It is closer to the old School Sport Partnership model than to the per-school grant most of us have worked with for the last decade. The intent is a network rather than a cheque.
The two hours question
The notice states that the network will support schools to protect two hours of PE weekly. It is written as a support function rather than an inspection one, but it is now embedded in the specification of a national contract, which changes the weight it carries.
If your current timetable does not comfortably reach two hours across every year group, that is the thing worth looking at this term. Not because anyone is coming to check the first term, but because the conversation is going to shift from whether you deliver it to how you evidence it.
Reducing inequality is the stated purpose
The programme is framed around reducing inequalities in access and participation and improving the quality and consistency of provision for all children. Quality and consistency are doing a lot of work in that sentence. Read alongside the award criteria, which put 70 per cent of the weighting on technical delivery including safeguarding, quality assurance and school-facing support, the direction is towards a more standardised offer with local flex, rather than each school buying what it fancies.
The money
Total programme funding is described as circa £513m, with the contract itself worth around £426m for the initial term. Most of that is pass-through funding, and the DfE has capped the price of the service element, which is a fairly clear signal that it wants the bulk of the money moving through to delivery rather than to administration.
What the notice does not say is how the money reaches your school or whether it reaches your school at all in the form of a budget line you control. That is the single biggest open question and it is not answered in this document.
Dates that matter to you
• 25th September 2026: bids close
• 25th November 2026: award decision expected
• 7th December 2026: contract start
• 31st March 2029: end of initial term, with options to extend to 2032
A December contract start means mobilisation runs through the spring, so the practical answer for most schools is that you will be dealing with the current arrangements for the rest of this academic year and meeting the new network somewhere in the 2027 to 2028 cycle. Plan on that basis but do not treat it as a promise. Procurements of this size slip.
What we still do not know
Being honest about the gaps is more useful than filling them in:
• whether schools receive funding directly or access provision commissioned on their behalf
• what the local footprint looks like and who holds it
• how existing partnerships, hubs and school games organisers fit in
• what happens to schools that have built provision around a specific external provider or a specific member of staff
• whether reporting requirements increase
Anyone telling you the detail on those points at this stage is guessing.
What is worth doing now
None of this needs a strategy day. Four things are genuinely useful:
Know your curriculum time. Get an accurate picture of PE minutes by year group, including what is lost to trips, assemblies and wet weather. If two hours becomes the benchmark, you want to be arguing from real numbers.
Keep your impact evidence tidy. Participation data, uptake among your least active pupils, club links, staff confidence. Whatever the funding mechanism turns out to be, being able to show where you started will help.
Protect staff development. Co-ordinated CPD is written into the specification, which means the national partner will arrive with a CPD offer. Teachers who have already worked alongside PE specialists tend to get far more out of that sort of programme than teachers meeting it cold.
Do not pause your planning. The most common mistake in a funding transition is to freeze. If your PE provision needs work, it needs work now. A school with strong provision going into a new network will do well out of it. A school waiting to be told what to do will not.
Our view
We think this is broadly good news. A national network with quality and consistency at its centre is a better foundation than a grant that some schools used brilliantly and others used to buy equipment that never left the cupboard. The risk sits in delivery, and in whether local structures end up close enough to individual schools to be useful.
We will keep reading the detail as it emerges and will share anything that changes the picture for schools. If it is helpful to talk through what your own provision looks like against what the specification is asking for, we are happy to do that.
