How the UK government buys training in 2026: frameworks, DPS and the Procurement Act, explained

First, the thing nobody explains: government does not buy like a company

If you have ever tried to sell training to a government department, or commission it from inside one, the process can feel deliberately opaque. It is not, quite. It just has its own machinery, and once you can see the machinery it stops being mysterious.

This is a plain-English tour of how UK public bodies buy training in 2026, whether you are the person commissioning it or the one hoping to deliver it.

The rules changed recently. The Procurement Act 2023 came into force and brought in a single new system for how contracts get published and how suppliers register. That system is the Central Digital Platform, which launched on 24 February 2025. The idea is register-once: a supplier sets up their core business details through Find a Tender using a GOV.UK One Login, and those details are reusable across bids instead of being re-keyed for every tender.

Where the work is advertised: Contracts Finder and Find a Tender

Public bodies have to advertise what they are buying, and there are two main places they do it. Which one depends on how big the contract is.

• Contracts Finder carries public-sector contracts over £12,000 including VAT. This is where most smaller and mid-sized training work shows up: a department buying a run of workshops, a council commissioning a short programme.
• Find a Tender carries the higher-value contracts, usually those above roughly £139,688 including VAT. The central-government goods and services threshold was updated to about £135,018 including VAT from 1 January 2026, so the exact line moves. The point is that this is the higher tier.

If you are a supplier, the advice is dull but true: monitor both. Small and medium contracts sit on Contracts Finder; the large frameworks and multi-year deals sit on Find a Tender. Watch only one and you miss half the market.

Framework or DPS? The distinction that decides whether you can get in

Most government training does not get bought one contract at a time. It gets bought through pre-arranged agreements that a buyer can call off from without running a full tender each time. There are two flavours, and the difference matters more than anything else in this post.

A framework is usually closed. Suppliers are appointed in a competition, a set of them win places, and then the door shuts for years. If you missed the competition, you wait for the next one. A Dynamic Purchasing System is the opposite. It stays open: new suppliers can be admitted at any time, there is no cap on how many it holds, and there is no joining fee.

The one worth knowing by name is RM6219 Learning and Training Services, an open DPS run by the Government Commercial Agency (the body formerly known as the Crown Commercial Service). Because it is a DPS, a training provider can join it at any point rather than waiting for a tender window. Suppliers pay only a small sales-based levy on business they actually win through it, around 0.33% on average and up to about 1%, so there is no cost to simply being on it. It runs to 27 October 2028, and its ceiling was uplifted to £850m in June 2026, which tells you how much learning flows through it.

For a buyer, that openness is useful. It means the RM6219 supplier pool keeps refreshing, so you are not stuck with whoever happened to win a competition three years ago.

How a supplier actually gets onto a framework

This is where a lot of suppliers get it wrong, so it is worth being precise. Getting onto a standard CCS or GCA framework, as opposed to simply joining the RM6219 DPS, is four steps:

• Find the tender. It will be advertised on Find a Tender, Contracts Finder, or the Government Commercial Agency's upcoming-agreements page. This is why you monitor all of them.
• Register on the GCA eSourcing portal. That is how you get access to the Invitation to Tender documents. Important: registering on the portal does not make you a supplier. It only lets you see the paperwork.
• Submit a tender, including a completed Procurement Selection Questionnaire (the PSQ). This is the form that checks you are a fit and proper organisation to hold a public contract.
• Be assessed on the quality of your answers and your pricing. Pass, and you win a place on the framework. Fail, and you do not.

The bit people miss is step two. Setting up a login and filling in your company profile feels like progress, but it is not the same as being an approved supplier. You have to respond to a live tender and win. The RM6219 DPS is the honourable exception, because there, joining genuinely is the whole process.

Learning Frameworks 2.0, and why small specialists enter through the side door

The biggest piece of central-government learning procurement right now is Learning Frameworks 2.0, a Cabinet Office agreement published on 7 February 2025. It is estimated at around £456m (figures up to roughly £560m appear across the different notice stages), it is structured in three lots, and it is meant to replace the existing central-government learning and development contracts.

Here is the honest read for a small provider. Learning Frameworks 2.0 is built for large prime suppliers who bring SMEs and specialist delivery partners into their supply chain. A boutique AI-training firm is not realistically going to win a prime place on it. What it can do is partner: deliver the specialist AI content as a subcontractor underneath a prime who holds the framework. For specialist work that is often how the good delivery actually happens. But you should go in knowing which door you are walking through.

If you are the buyer: how to commission AI training without the headache

Suppose you lead learning in a department or a council and you want AI training for your teams. You do not need to understand all of the above to buy well, but a few of these facts save real time.

To be straight about our own position: Fautons is not currently an approved supplier on any of these frameworks. We are a specialist that delivers the training, either directly for a buyer who can commission us within their own rules, or as a delivery partner under a prime. Knowing the machinery is how we make sure the paperwork is never the reason good training does not happen.

• For a smaller programme, you may not need a framework at all. Below the thresholds you have room to run a light-touch procurement or a direct award within your own rules. Check with your commercial team, but do not assume every purchase needs a full tender.
• For a larger or repeatable programme, calling off from a DPS like RM6219 gives you a pre-vetted pool and a faster route than starting a fresh open tender.
• Whichever route, scope the outcome before the format. What should people be able to do afterwards? Map it to the Government Campus AI prospectus tiers of Foundation, Working and Expert, so you are commissioning capability rather than seat-time.

If you want the delivery detail rather than the procurement detail, we wrote separately about what hands-on Claude and AI training in 2026 actually looks like for a public sector team, and about what corporate AI training costs so you can budget honestly. The overview of the AI and Claude training for public sector teams we deliver sits alongside both.