Deciding who should manage procurement in your trust

You need to set the right level of delegation when it comes to procurement, based on what’s right for your trust. Use this guidance to help you decide how centralised your procurement should be, and how to delegate key tasks.

Last reviewed on 1 March 2022
School types: All · School phases: All
Ref: 44232
Contents
  1. Consider these questions
  2. The benefits of different approaches
  3. Decide who will manage particular tasks
  4. Download our template to record the people involved on each contract

Consider these questions

Exactly how your approach to procurement works will depend on your organisational structure and how you then delegate purchasing and contract management tasks. 

Consider the following questions to think about the best structural approach for your trust - i.e. what you control centrally, versus how much you delegate.

What’s your vision for where you want to be in 3 or 5 years' time?

You need to consider your trust strategic plan and objectives when thinking about what procurement decisions you centralise or delegate. 

You might centralise some procurement because it'll help you achieve a trust-wide objective. For example, if your trust wants to be fully cloud based in 3 years, you might centralise much of your IT procurement. That way you make sure your trust buys strictly cloud-based products and services rather than server based.  

What are you purchasing and what level of standardisation is there between individual academies’ orders?  

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