The Government’s Department for Education (DfE) has launched an early market engagement exercise to identify organisations that might be interested in supplying the second phase of their gigabit broadband roll-out programme for Schools, which has been allocated £20m of public funding to reach around a further 800 schools across England.

In case anybody has forgotten, we’ve already seen several past programmes that have attempted to improve gigabit broadband connectivity in schools. Between 2019 and 2022 approximately 800 rural schools were connected through the Local Full Fibre Networks (LFFN) and Rural Gigabit Connectivity (RGC) programmes, funded by the government’s Building Digital UK (BDUK) agency through a grant-based approach.

Between 2023 and 2026 this was followed by the Schools Gigabit Broadband Programme (Phase 1), which connected a further 800 schools through a DfE-led procurement, partially funded by BDUK (here). Preliminary market engagement on Phase 2 of this programme is now kicking off with a public investment of £20m excluding VAT, which is the same level of funding as allocated to Phase 1. Phase 1 actually committed £45m but only £20m went on network deployments and the rest was used for other things, such as in-school software, Wi-Fi upgrades and security etc.

“Building on the programme’s success to date, the Department plans to launch a further phase to connect approximately 800 schools across England that still require gigabit-capable broadband. This will help ensure that all schools have access to reliable, high-speed digital infrastructure that meets DfE standard,” said the notice.

The proposed contract is tentatively expected to run for three years from 1st March 2027 to 28th February 2030 and the government seeks feedback on their first market engagement for this by 4th January 2027. A question mark does however remain over whether £20m is enough to reach a further 800 schools, given how many of those that remain will be in increasingly challenging locations. But the market engagement should help to answer that question.