Influencing Partners & Providers

Influencing Partners

Through our Royal Charter, we are able to validate programmes offered by institutions that want to make OU awards. This is essential in supporting our mission to widen access to higher education. Our work involves institutional approval, review and programme validation activity. OU validated awards have parity of esteem with awards offered throughout UK higher education. So a validated award is exactly the same as an OU direct award in terms of employment and application for postgraduate study. We currently validate almost 300 programmes at undergraduate and postgraduate level.
Visit our Validation Partnerships website 

Influencing Providers

We encourage and, where relevant, require companies and other organisations that bid for University goods and services to practice equality and diversity in employment and service delivery.

Embedding Equality

We have embedded equality considerations at all stages of our tender process:

• At the pre-qualification stage, we ensure that organisations we may contract are compliant with current equality law and that they will comply with the public sector equality duty in the provision of goods or services on behalf of the University.
• In making decisions about award criteria, we consider the relevance of equality to the contract.
• In determining contract conditions and creating the contract, we include a general equality condition for all contracts, and specific conditions where relevant.
• In monitoring adherence to contact conditions, we provide assurance that companies are meeting the commitments they have agreed to.

Our Tendering System

We manage our EU and non-EU tender processes through an electronic tendering system called In-Tend. The system is fully web-based and is used to tender for goods and services being sought by the University and gives easy and open access for suppliers to express interest in procurement opportunities.  Visit the OU's Procurement website 

photographer: Andy Pini