Historic Royal Palaces is a team of people who love and look after six of the most wonderful palaces in the world and their magnificent historical gardens.
We are recruiting for a Procurement & Contracts Apprentice , giving you a fantastic opportunity to grow and develop your skills whilst working at our historical sites.
To provide support to the Procurement & Contracts team at Historic Royal Palaces with respect to day to day procurement activity across all spend categories (excluding Building Works and Retail Goods for re-sale).
The role requires the provision of flexible levels of support to the Procurement team in respect of competitively tendering lower spends and general ad-hoc contract and commercial advice across all areas of the business, not all directly procurement related.
Maintenance of the contracts database, e-Signature platform, supplier due diligence and e-Tendering Portals are key aspects.
Whilst Studying Towards Your Apprenticeship You Will Also Be
Administration
- Team administration support using a variety of Microsoft Packages (including Word, Excel and PowerPoint) to compose and update documents
- Manage procurement intranet site; including upload and management of documents
- Provide procurement contributions to Finance newsletter
- Annually coordinate updating of counter-party risk list
- Insurance administration including yearly updates and endorsements and renewal cycle
- Arrangement and facilitation of meetings- agendas, minutes and room bookings
- Savings log management
- Attend monthly Procurement team meetings and provide secretariat duties
- Monitor the procurement department email address and insurance email address
- Logging/filing final copies of contracts and related documents
- File/organise best practice notes and articles
- Deal with communications (mostly over the telephone and face to face) with other stakeholders in the business
- Database Work
- Maintain and report on the procurement contracts database
- Maintain the Procurement Activity Plan (PAP)
- Research
- Research new procurement consortium frameworks and advise e.g. CCS, LUPC
- Review procurement policies, strategy and guidance documents
- Research legislative changes or best practice update
- Systems
- Procurement invoice processes and use of financial system E-FIN
- Undertake credit checks and update notification facility
- Assist and manage the roll out and training of an e-Signature platform
- Maintain the e-Signature platform and provide ongoing support to HRP teams
- Learn and support the team with the e-Tendering system for increased use in tender exercises
- Tender Activity
- Assist in researching potential tenderers
- Prepare and coordinate signing of non-disclosure/confidentiality agreements
- Prepare Invitation to Tenders (ITT), tender timetable and contract documents
- Coordinate feedback from stakeholders on tender documents
- Manage the issue of ITTs through the online tender management tool
- Coordinate communications with tenderers throughout process
- Organise site visit and question and answer schedules
- Coordinate tenderer reference checks
- Coordinate question and answer documents for tenderers and attend sessions
- Coordinate and attend tender presentation meetings
- Arrange and lead stakeholder meetings
- Coordinate signing of contracts and internal approvals
- Simple sourcing/best value exercises
- Contract Related
- Draft and coordinate signing of contract extensions and variations
- Creating list of approved standard clauses for use within the procurement team
- Arrangement of music and copyright licensing annually
Requirements
More than anything we are looking for potential, but, as this Apprenticeship starts at level 4 we do have a few eligibility requirements:
- You must be 18 years old or over on 2nd September 2025.
- Live in UK (resident in country role is based).
- You must not have completed a degree or equivalent level qualification in the UK or elsewhere and not already be in full-time education.
- Five GCSEs at grade C (or 4) or above, including English and mathematics (or equivalent)
