What an RFP should say about academics, curriculum, and lesson planning

Describe the school’s work

State subjects, year groups, campuses, users, curriculum, resources, classes, reports, calendar, current tools, integrations, constraints, outcome, scope, and decision timeline.

Ask vendors to respond to planning, resource, class, substitution, progress, reporting, and correction decisions rather than generic features.

Require realistic scenarios

Include absent teacher, substitute, changed class, mixed group, revised outcome, missing lesson, duplicate resource, transferred student, reporting-period change, integration failure, and outage.

Require expected result, manual work, limitation, evidence, owner, support route, and acceptance test for each response.

Require responsibility and control

Ask who maps curriculum, reviews resources, migrates content, validates classes, trains teachers, supports exceptions, reconciles reports, handles incidents, manages access, and returns data.

GOV.UK school guidance emphasises accountable and secure handling. The U.S. Department of Education data governance checklist covers quality, access, security, lifecycle, sharing, disposal, and monitoring.

Make commercial answers complete

Request subscription, setup, migration, integration, training, support, reports, accessibility, storage, growth, internal effort, exports, retention, and contract-end costs. The U.S. Department of Education data-quality guidance links quality with definitions, rules, validation, infrastructure, and professional learning.

Make the next improvement testable

Use this guidance to improve one bounded part of what an RFP should say about school academic management software. Name the owner, academic record, evidence, correction route, and review date so staff can apply it consistently.

Check an ordinary academic case and one meaningful exception. If either depends on undocumented knowledge, add the missing definition, validation rule, permission, training note, or support route.

Record what changed, what remains manual, and who reviews the result before the next lesson cycle or reporting period.

Keep the decision beside its evidence so the next teacher or leader can understand the rule without relying on informal memory.

Use the review to decide whether the change should be expanded, repaired, narrowed, or held.

Recheck the boundary when a subject, campus, role, integration, calendar, or policy changes. A familiar workflow can carry a different access or retention risk after a small change.