DfE £15.4bn CF25 contractors: pipeline and design takeaways for project teams
Reviewed by Tom Sullivan
First reported on The Construction Index
30 Second Briefing
The Department for Education has appointed 23 contractors, including Kier, Bam, Galliford Try, Morgan Sindall, Wates and Willmott Dixon, to its £15.4bn Construction Framework 25 (CF25) for new-build and refurbishment of schools, academies, UTCs and FE colleges. CF25 will run for six years from January 2026 to January 2032, with potential extension to 2034, and is split into two value bands (£4.4m–£12m and over £12m) across 10 regional lots. The framework will shape pipeline, procurement routes and standardised design approaches for education projects over the next decade.
Technical Brief
- Framework notice is published under reference 012929-2026 on Find a Tender, enabling early pipeline review.
- Ten regional lots allow contractors to optimise local supply chains, logistics and site labour resourcing.
- Inclusion of McAvoy Modular Offsite and Reds10 signals strong emphasis on modular and offsite construction solutions.
- Mix of national majors (Kier, Bam, Morgan Sindall, Wates, Willmott Dixon) and regionals (e.g. Caddick, Conlon, Meldrum) spreads capacity and risk.
Our Take
With a six-year base term to 2032 and potential extension to 2034, CF25 gives Kier, Bam, Morgan Sindall and peers unusually long pipeline visibility compared with most UK public frameworks in our database, which typically run three to four years, supporting investment in regional delivery teams and offsite capacity.
The £4.4m–£12m value banding and 10 regional lots suggest the Department for Education is structurally reserving space for mid-tier contractors such as Caddick, Conlon and Speller Metcalfe, rather than allowing the largest players to dominate all school packages.
In our infrastructure coverage, education work has often been used by firms like Galliford Try and Willmott Dixon to balance more cyclical commercial sectors; CF25’s scale and duration in the United Kingdom are likely to make it a core workload stabiliser through the late 2020s construction cycle.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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