Guidance

Appendix F – framework evaluation standard

Published 23 March 2026

Applies to England

The following standards apply to Department for Education (DfE) funded schemes and education schemes. Framework users procuring non-school schemes shall apply the principles of these standards in their procurement activity under the construction framework and shall comply at all times with the regulations.

Overall Responsibility

On DfE projects, DfE project directors are ultimately responsible for ensuring that tender evaluations are conducted:

• fairly
• transparently
• in accordance with the DfE construction framework rules

In the case of non-DfE projects the external user is ultimately responsible for ensuring this.

Forming the evaluation team

You must select suitably skilled and experienced evaluators to make up the evaluation team before the start of the procurement.

The evaluation team must be published within the preliminary invitation to tender (PITT) engagement-based selection route (EBSR), invitation to tender (ITT) or invitation to submit proposal (ISP) (EBSR or submission-based selection route (SBSR).

If you need to make changes to the evaluation team after issuing the PITT or ITT, these changes should be recorded and issued to bidders via a tender clarification.

A minimum of 2 and maximum of 3 evaluators must be assigned to each question, unless the question is scored by a mathematical formula, in which case the score must be calculated and then checked by at least one other person working independently.

Each evaluator must have the appropriate skills, knowledge and experience to evaluate the question responses in their entirety and not be aware of any potential conflict of interest.

For the evaluation of design questions, 2 professionally qualified architects (or other relevant design professionals) should be assigned as evaluators.

The nominated TA lead architect shall attend all CEMs.

A secondary TA architect will attend CEMs relevant to the areas they will evaluate.

Evaluators of EBSR design proposals at ITT must have attended the relevant CEMs.

Each evaluator must evaluate every bid response received for their question and evaluators may be assigned to more than one question.

Specialist advisers may be assigned to provide advice to evaluators on specific aspects of the bid responses. For example, ICT advisers may provide advice to evaluators on the ICT elements of an overall construction programme. Evaluators may take account of the advice offered to the extent relevant to the criteria, but not further.

A moderator, who is not one of the evaluators, must be assigned to oversee the moderation. The moderator must be familiar with the framework evaluation process and be suitably trained by DfE in moderation to enter the moderation pool as managed by the framework team.

A compliance checker must be assigned. A compliance check must take place before evaluation commences.

Preparing for evaluation

Evaluators should discuss the question, scoring criteria and how they will apply to the scheme in advance of receiving bid responses.

For a consistent approach, evaluators are guided to start evaluations at an expected score of 10 and work backwards from this point in line with the published scoring criteria.

Compliance check

Once the bid deadline has passed, the compliance checker must check that each bid response contains the necessary documentation and that question responses comply with the word limits (unless otherwise stated, word limits include words contained within tables, graphics, and images). Any links to supplementary documents will not be evaluated.

All words in excess of the word count allowed per question shall be redacted by the compliance checker prior to evaluators having access to bid submissions.

At the discretion of the project team, and with framework team approval, the bidding panel members may be given the opportunity to correct genuine errors (examples could include, but not be limited to, formulaic errors or attachments not included) after they have submitted their bid. In correcting any genuine errors, a strict time limit will be applied within which to respond.

By way of guidance, an extension to correct a genuine error should be in hours, not days.

Bid responses must be sent to evaluators mentioning the word limit used and informing them of any question response that exceeds the word limit.

Pricing proposals must conform to the pricing rules as reflected in the pricing guidance, and prices submitted by the bidding panel member shall not exceed the relevant prices in the bidding panel member’s framework pricing schedule save to the extent necessary to reflect any scheme-specific requirements identified by the framework user in the ITT.

Evaluation

The evaluation team will disregard any statements that exceed the word limit. Unless otherwise stated, word limits include words contained within:

• tables
• photo captions
• graphics
• infographics
• images

Any attempt to adjust or ‘normalise’ price responses is not permitted. If it appears that a bidding Panel Member has not priced to deliver the full scope or has excluded an essential pre-construction or construction item, a clarification must be issued to that party.

Each evaluator must produce scores and comments independently and submit to the moderator via the award portal.

Clarification

In order to evaluate a panel member’s response, evaluators may ask for clarification questions to be sent to bidding panel members. Clarifications should be limited to genuine ambiguity or uncertainty, and to essential matters that a panel member can answer in one or two sentences. They should not be permitted to amend their price consequent to a response to a clarification in respect of a quality question.

The clarification process must be concluded to the DfE scheme team’s satisfaction, prior to moderation.

Moderation

A moderator will be assigned from the DfE moderation pool as determined by the framework team who manage this process. The moderator shall be independent of the project team. A moderation meeting (chaired by the moderator) must be held to agree final scores and comments. By way of guidance, all schemes in mini-competition (EBSR and SBSR) must be moderated. For the moderation of ISP responses under a direct allocation procedure, project teams should discuss this with the framework team prior to evaluation by contacting dfepipeline.CONSTRUCTIONFRAMEWORKS@education.gov.uk.

All evaluators must be present for the moderation of all the questions they have evaluated. During the moderation evaluators must discuss their scores by consensus until they reach agreement on the final score and reasons or comments. Scores should not be discussed prior to the moderation meeting. During moderation evaluators must not use average scores or majority voting to determine final scores.

The moderator must ensure that all question responses are scored in accordance with the scoring criteria published in the PITT, ITT or ISP issued to the framework members.

Informing framework members

Framework members must be informed of the outcome using the framework letter template.

Project directors must provide detailed feedback using the table within the framework letter template.

Feedback meetings are encouraged.

Framework reporting

Once completed and approved, project directors must send the evaluation or tender report to the framework team by email at dfepipeline.CONSTRUCTIONFRAMEWORKS@education.gov.uk for information.