How to get school run contracts from council online?
Councils publish school transport opportunities on national portals such as Contracts Finder, or on the devolved portals for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Search for passenger transport notices, register for alerts, prepare your bid, and study past award notices to see who already wins this work.
School run work, such as home-to-school taxi and minibus contracts, is public sector procurement. A council that needs a vehicle and driver for a named route will usually run a tender or a further competition and publish the outcome as an award notice. Public bodies are required to publish details of the contracts they award, so the process is largely online and the paper trail is public. Understanding where notices appear is most of the battle.
[1][3]Step 1: find the right portal
Contracts Finder is the main UK government portal for searching contract opportunities worth over £12,000 including VAT with the government and its agencies. You can search by sector, see what is coming up in the future, and look up details of previous tenders and contracts. You can create an account to get email updates and save your searches, though you can still search and apply without an account. Higher value contracts, usually above £139,688 including VAT, appear on the Find a Tender service instead. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland each have their own dedicated public sector procurement websites: Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales, and eSourcing NI and eTendersNI respectively. Which portal applies depends on where the council is, so start with the one covering that nation.
[1]Step 2: understand the rules the council is following
The Procurement Act 2023 replaces the Public Contracts Regulations 2015, and from March 2025 new commercial agreements are being implemented under the Act. Notices are published through a central digital platform comprising an enhanced Find a Tender service and a new Supplier Information Service, with a single registration covering both. Cabinet Office guidance arranges the rules into four stages of the commercial pathway: Plan, Define, Procure and Manage, covering subjects from preliminary market engagement and competitive tendering procedures through to conditions of participation, exclusions and assessment summaries. Reading the relevant guidance helps you anticipate what a council must ask for and how it must evaluate bids. One caution: some agreements started the procurement process before March 2025 and will be awarded under the older regulations, so check which regime a specific procurement follows.
[2][3]Step 3: study the award record before you bid
Award notices are not just formalities; they are research material. Under the Procurement Act 2023 regulations, a contract award notice must state the contracting authority information, the title of the procurement, the contract subject-matter, each awarded supplier's name and contact details, whether the supplier is a small and medium-sized enterprise, the date the authority decided to award the contract, the estimated value of the contract, and the procedure used, among other details. For contracts with an estimated value of more than £5 million, the names of unsuccessful suppliers must also be published. For a small school run contract, the notice will at minimum tell you who won, roughly what it was worth and when it was decided.
[4]Real published notices show how this looks in practice. Recent award records include Suffolk County Council Passenger Transport awarding a four-seater vehicle route from Lakenheath to The Arch at Castle Manor School in Haverhill to Dash Travel UK Ltd for a published value of £20,153, and Leicester City Council awarding taxi contracts for named sites including Ellesmere College in Aylestone to local operators. These are award notices, not live opportunities, but they reveal which councils buy this service, at what scale, and which operators currently hold the work. Searching a site that indexes Contracts Finder awards by buyer, supplier and region, such as UK Public Money, makes this kind of reconnaissance straightforward. One caution: published values may cover frameworks, amendments or multiple suppliers, and are not verified supplier revenue.
[5][3]A practical comparison
| What you want to know | Where to look | What it gives you |
|---|---|---|
| Live school run tenders | Contracts Finder, or the devolved portal for your nation | New opportunities, future pipelines, saved searches and email alerts |
| Who won past routes | Award notices, indexed by buyer and region | Winning operator, notice value, award date and route description |
| Which rules apply | Cabinet Office Procurement Act 2023 guidance | Procedures, participation conditions, exclusions and evaluation rules |
A concrete example of the workflow: suppose you run a four-seat taxi firm in East Anglia. You would register on Contracts Finder, save a search for passenger transport opportunities, and set email alerts. In parallel, you would look up past awards by Suffolk County Council Passenger Transport to see typical route descriptions and the operators already on the roster. When a matching tender opens, you would respond to the published conditions of participation. After the decision, the council must publish an award notice, and the notice records whether assessment summaries have been provided to each supplier that submitted an assessed tender. If unsuccessful, that feedback is your evidence for improving the next bid.
[1][4][5]Your practical next step: register on the correct portal for the council's nation, save a passenger transport search with alerts, and pull the last year of that council's school transport award notices to map the incumbent suppliers and typical values before the next tender round opens.
[1][5]Sources and dates
- https://www.gov.uk/contracts-finder · accessed 2026-10-18
- https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/procurement-act-2023-guidance-documents · accessed 2026-10-18
- https://www.gca.gov.uk/glossary · accessed 2026-10-18
- https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2024/692/regulation/27/data.xht · accessed 2026-10-18
- https://ukpublicmoney.co.uk/ · accessed 2026-10-18