A major group of training providers is suing the Education and Skills Funding Agency (ESFA) for damages and demanding a re-run of the national adult education budget procurement following its unsuccessful bids.
Learning Curve Group and its seven offshoots have filed a claim in the High Court of Justice against the ESFA, alleging that the government agency “acted unlawfully” in evaluating the providers’ bids for an AEB contract.
Court documents, seen by FE Week, claim that the providers’ low tender scores awarded by the ESFA were supported by “brief” and “vague” reasons and did not enable the claimants to “understand the reasons for the decisions”.
Learning Curve Group claims it was “deprived of a real chance of winning a contract” and the agency has “unlawfully failed to create or retain lawful, sufficient contemporaneous records of the reasons for the scores awarded”.
