Tilbury Douglas has been appointed to the Cavendish School rebuild contract, a £31 million scheme procured through the Department for Education’s Construction Framework 2025 under a two-stage route that begins with early supplier involvement before progressing to full design and build.
The appointment, with an award decision dated 4 August, covers design and construction or refurbishment of the mainstream all-through school. The contract is due to start on 25 August and run until November 2029. The procurement notice listed the contract value at £31m excluding VAT, or £37.2m including VAT.
Framework appointment and procurement route for the Cavendish School rebuild contract
Tilbury Douglas was selected from lot two of the DfE Construction Framework 2025, which covers high-value projects in the South, without further competition. The appointment initiates a preconstruction services agreement (PCSA) to facilitate early supplier involvement, allowing the contractor to contribute to design development and programme planning before works are formally committed. The project is expected to progress to a JCT Design and Build contract following detailed design and final agreement of the works. The procurement notice did not name the project architect.
The two-stage procurement route, with its PCSA entry point, is well established on the DfE framework as a mechanism for managing design risk on complex or high-value school projects, giving the contractor early influence over buildability and programme before the main contract is executed.
School Rebuilding Programme background and Tilbury Douglas’s framework record
The Cavendish School was selected for the government’s School Rebuilding Programme in December 2022, assessed as an “exceptional case” because of severe problems with its estate. The School Rebuilding Programme targets schools whose condition presents the most pressing safety and learning-environment challenges, prioritising those where fabric deterioration has reached a critical threshold.
According to Tilbury Douglas, the contractor has successfully collaborated on the DfE framework to deliver over £755m of school building projects since 2015, spanning primary, secondary, SEND, and higher and further education. The company describes itself as one of the top performing partners on the framework, a position that informed its selection for lot two without the need for further competition on this appointment.
That cumulative programme volume reflects the scale of capital investment the DfE has channelled through its framework contractors over the past decade, with the School Rebuilding Programme representing one of the more sustained government commitments to addressing backlogged maintenance and structural deficiency across the state school estate.
From an embodied and operational carbon perspective, school rebuilds of this scale carry material consequence. New-build replacement of a deteriorating estate can reduce operational energy demand substantially compared with heavily patched existing stock, though the embodied carbon trade-off against deep retrofit remains a live design question. The procurement notice’s reference to “design and construction or refurbishment” suggests the precise scope, and therefore the carbon profile of the works, will be resolved during the PCSA stage as Tilbury Douglas and the design team work through the options.
The Department for Education published the award notice via Find a Tender, with the PCSA period now under way ahead of the anticipated progression to the main JCT Design and Build contract once detailed design is complete and the works cost finalised.
