Schools tender for catering and cleaning, not software
By David Cooper · 8 September 2026
Of 909 school and trust award notices since the Procurement Act took effect, catering is the largest category at 54 and cleaning second at 39. IT services account for five.
This one genuinely surprised us, and it's the sort of thing you only see once you've imported the whole file rather than searching it for your own product.
Ranked by number of distinct awards, the top of the list reads: school catering 54, school cleaning 39, sewage and refuse and environmental services 21, grounds maintenance 14, general cleaning 10, office and computing equipment 9, catering services 7, building cleaning 6, facilities management 5, and IT consulting and software development 5.
Nine of the top ten categories are facilities. The classroom barely appears.
That isn't because schools don't buy software. It's because of how they buy it. A formal award notice is generated by a competitive process above a threshold. Most edtech lands below that threshold, or gets bought through an existing framework that was competed once by somebody else, or comes out of a departmental budget small enough that nobody runs a tender at all. None of that produces a notice.
Catering and cleaning are the opposite. They're large, recurring, multi-year and site-based, which is exactly the shape that forces a formal competition.
So the honest advice splits by what you sell. If you sell catering, cleaning, grounds maintenance or estates work, Find a Tender is close to a complete picture of the formal end of your market and you should be watching it weekly. If you sell software, it will show you almost nothing and you'd be better off working from trust size and existing contract renewal dates.
One more caution on scale. 909 awards over eighteen months, against 24,553 schools, is thin. The overwhelming majority of what schools buy never generates a notice at all, and anyone building a market-sizing model on this file is measuring the tip.
Method. Counted as distinct awards, not supplier rows, from Find a Tender award notices between 25 February 2025 and 1 September 2026, grouped by the CPV description on the notice. CPV codes are chosen by the buyer and are often approximate, so treat the ranking as indicative rather than exact.