NCS Trust uses third party organisations to assess NCS Trust’s delivery partners to ensure NCS activities are consistently being delivered safely and to a high standard. Currently the NCS Trust assesses partners for Quality Assurance purposes and for Health & Safety compliance (including safeguarding).

As NCS programmes and activities expand, we add new service lines and numbers of participants increase, there is a growing importance on ensuring quality, consistency and continuous improvement. To ensure NCS Trust is able to assess the quality of delivery to the level of detail, scrutiny and scale required, the NCS Trust requires a specialist organisation to undertake quality assurance assessments, a service which has matured since its inception.

Conduct assessments in line with the Programme Quality Framework (PQF) and support in reviews and it’s future developments

provide the NCS network with high quality observational data on delivery of NCS activities that will be in the form of: verbal feedback to providers during/after the assessment and in a formal written report that is shared with the Trust and relevant Managing Partner

provide the NCS Trust with a summary report at the end of assessment cycles that identify key trends and observations

Support continuous improvement of NCS services across the network through feedback and coaching during assessments and identifying best practice and improvement trends nationally

The Requirements for the Services that Bidders are to meet are described in full in Schedule B (Specification) provided as part of the ITT.