Women Returners

SDS has a requirement to procure, on behalf of the Scottish Government, the delivery of Women Returner programme, which aims to support women returners across Scotland who have had a career break of 6 months or more due to childcare, other care or health commitments or have multiple barriers to employment, e.g. older women (over 50 years of age), disabled women, lone parents, minority ethnic women, women affected by domestic abuse, women from rural or SIMD areas, female veterans/spouses of veterans and also focus on sectors where women are significantly underrepresented in the workforce and at senior levels.

The delivery of Women Returner programme, which aims to support women returners across Scotland who have had a career break of 6 months or more due to childcare, other care or health commitments or have multiple barriers to employment, e.g. older women (over 50 years of age), disabled women, lone parents, minority ethnic women, women affected by domestic abuse, women from rural or SIMD areas, female veterans/spouses of veterans and also focus on sectors where women are significantly underrepresented in the workforce and at senior levels.

The Programme will support activities that enable the participants to address the barriers that are preventing them from moving along the strategic skills pipeline and allow them to progress to the next stage e.g. employment, education, or training.

Experience of delivering same or similar services are defined as Employability interventions, such as Employability Fund, Fair Start Scotland, Work Able Scotland, Women Returner Initiatives, National Transition Training Fund or Work Programme. Modern Apprenticeships, Work Based Learning and Individual Training Accounts would not be deemed as similar.

Please note that the relevant selection criteria is included in the SPD Scotland Module - Part 2 Information concerning the bidder, Part 3 Exclusions Grounds and Part 4 Selection Criteria - these are pass/fail criteria Additional information: Economic operators may be excluded from this competition if they are in any of the situations referred to in regulation 58 of the Public

Contracts (Scotland) Regulations 2015.