1st Jul 2015

The team behind CPC have been working in procurement for many years and we know that the goalposts are always moving; new EU Legislation and changes in best practice can make it difficult to keep up to date and to know that you are doing the right thing, which is where CPC can help you.

We have created Crescent Learning website which was built with your procurement needs as the main driver. Crescent Learning links through to FELP where you will find information on best practice, legislation, templates, sample documents and a wealth of other procurement information which will make your procurement journey that bit easier.

It’s second nature to us to want to bring together resources and share them with our peers – after all that’s what a consortium is all about. So this is us, pooling our knowledge and resources to share with all of you. The website is fully live now and whilst we’re really proud of how it looks, we plan to continuously improve it to ensure it’s your go to place for procurement resources.

Our Regional Training season is over – here’s what we’ve learned

Every year we run a series of regional training sessions tailored to our FE colleges and academies, starting in September and running through to June.

We’ve worked hard to pinpoint the key areas of procurement knowledge that you’ll have to know and to build sessions that are both comprehensive but also easy to digest.

We know that there is an appetite for short burst training sessions like these – that’s why we started offering them to begin with. However, we’ve seen the actual attendance figures drop steadily over the course of the year and we think we know why. It’s getting harder to justify time away from the office, even for essential training. We know that working in education is frenetic to say the least and that procurement is usually just one component of a very packed workload.

Training is essential for the development of a knowledgeable and effective procurement community and we are passionate about delivering core skills training to everyone who wants it – we just need to change the delivery mechanism.

We are looking into distance learning options for example webinars, online tutorials, slide packs and downloadable guides. We don’t know what the new training offering will look like yet but we have a lot of ideas. Crescent Learning will be at the heart of any training we offer, just to make sure that all of our resources are in one place.

If CPC is procurement for education, then Crescent Learning is education for procurement!