In January 2011, VECs, local authorities or other public bodies interested in taking on administrative responsibility for the centralised student grants awarding and payments function were invited to submit proposals to the Department detailing how they might best deliver the overall service. The criteria used to evaluate the proposals were set out in the Expressions of Interest invitation and were as follows:
- Organisational capacity to perform the function
- Experience in dealing with comparable schemes/services
- Existing core management, expertise and resources available to be deployed to the function
- Capacity to deliver strong cost and efficiency benefits
- Overall quality of the proposal for delivery of a central student grants function.
While a contingency plan for dealing with delays was not specifically part of the proposals submitted by each of the bodies, the ability of the bodies to perform the function and respond to challenges was however considered by the independent selection panel when evaluating the proposals against the evaluation criteria. The project management capacity and proposed organisation structure were also considered in the context of the evaluation criteria. The resource structures proposed and subsequently put in place by SUSI provided it with the flexibility to ramp up and resources to respond to unforeseen challenges in the processing of grants.
