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A specialist provider is being sought to provide schools across London with cybersecurity software for the next nine years.

London Grid for Learning (LGfL), a non-profit organisation that seeks to help schools access funding and save money via aggregated procurement, has published a notice of an upcoming opportunity through which it will seek a single supplier to “provide an enterprise-type antivirus and malware-protection tool”. 

Bidders must be able to provide a platform offering the “ability to harvest licenses (sell, move, recover) via a self-administered console which shall be deployed to endpoints such as workstations and servers as appropriate and used by a wide range of public sector organisations and charitable organisations”.

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“LGfL shall act as the aggregator and a managed service provider making the… [antivirus tool] available to customers that consume LGfL's broadband provision and [other] public sector organisations and charitable organisations,” the procurement notice [4] added. 

The chosen firm will be awarded a contract running for an initial term of five years, plus two potential two-year extensions. The deal will be worth between £25m and £50m to the chosen supplier.

Bidding is due to open on 8 July, ahead of an expected contract start date of 2 September.

LGfL was jointly created 20 years ago by all local authorities across the capital. It now works with more than 3,500 schools throughout England, including 92% of those in London. 

Among its key offerings is a broadband network through which it also claims to provide to schools £11m of additional licences, such as remote-desktop access and cloud back-up – as well as security products. In the last seven years, the charitable trust also claims to have “identified more than £50m in potential funding for free school meals”.