St Bede's School ~ Catering Tender

St Bede’s School, Redhill, is seeking to appoint a contractor to work in partnership with the school to provide a healthy and innovative school meals service within our existing facilities.

There are currently 1950 students on roll, aged 11-18, and 220 teaching and support staff. It is very important that this service delivers high standards in procurement, production, and customer care as well as value for money. Speed and efficiency of service will also be critical in this large school.

The school would wish the successful contractor to review the current range of services offered and make recommendations, ensuring that the menu offer is varied, and the food served is of good quality, with a focus on the provision of fresh, healthy and nutritious meals, rather than ‘Grab & Go’ snacks.

St Bede’s School is unique as the only state-funded school in the UK where Anglicans, Roman Catholics and the Free Churches are bound together in a formal ecumenical partnership. The school aims to provide ‘Christian education at its best’ and when last inspected by Ofsted in March 2023, every aspect was judged outstanding.

We are an extremely popular and oversubscribed school, and as one of the largest secondary schools in Surrey, we are very proud of our impressive facilities. Our recent £6.4 million expansion and refurbishment project was completed in 2019, and includes spacious and modern classrooms, new science labs, additional computer science rooms and enhanced music facilities. The school canteen has also recently been redesigned and enlarged, and in 2021 we installed an external food kiosk to provide an additional servery point to relieve congestion and minimise the queues in our busy canteen area. Our popular sixth form also has its own dedicated cafe, and we would welcome recommendations from the successful contractor on delivering a food offer that is exclusive to our sixth form students.

Sustainability and reducing waste are a key focus at St Bede’s and specific plans for the reduction of single use plastics and use of biodegradable packaging would be of great interest to our students, staff, and governors.

The contract being tendered is for a 3 + 2 Year contract and will operate as a Guaranteed Performance Contract, with the successful Contractor offering the school a guaranteed return / cost per annum for the provision of catering services. Sovereignty of the cash tariff is to remain with St Bede’s School for the duration of this contract.

Please see SQ document for more information.