Buying and booking
The catalogue, and the five kinds of service
Annual SLAs, consultancy, courses, products and digital assets: what each of the five commits you to.
On this page
The catalogue is everything City Council offers, in one place: services, courses, e-learning, guidance and news together rather than in five separate lists. Nothing selected shows a few of each; the link on a group heading narrows the page to that kind alone.
The five kinds of service
Every priced item is one of five types, and the type tells you what you are committing to more reliably than the title does.
| Type | What it is |
|---|---|
| Annual SLA | A service level agreement for an academic year, or several. It renews, and the renewal is the thing to watch: see renewals. |
| Consultancy | Named days or half-days of somebody's time. Often bought as an entitlement you then draw down: see visits. |
| Training Course | A dated session with a place on it. Bought by the place rather than by the school: see booking a place. |
| Physical Product | Something that arrives: signage, a resource pack, equipment. |
| Digital Asset | A licence, a subscription to written material, a set of templates. Usually what unlocks reserved guidance. |
An item's own page
Every item has a page carrying the same things in the same order: what it is, what it costs and how that was worked out, what is included, who is eligible, and the terms that apply. If a price depends on your school, the page shows the calculation with your own numbers in it rather than a table you have to read yourself. See what a price means.
Eligibility
Some items are only for certain kinds of school: primary only, maintained only, in-borough only. Where you are not eligible the page says so and says why, rather than hiding the item. That matters because "we do not sell this to academies" and "we have not written this yet" are very different answers to give a business manager.
Whether you already have it
If your school already holds something, its catalogue page says so and links to the contract instead of offering to sell it again. Everything you hold is on your contracts page.
Service areas
Items belong to a service area — HR, ICT, Governance, Catering and the rest. Each area has a page of its own with what it does, what it sells, the named people in it and what it has published. If you deal with one team more than the others, its page is a better front door than the catalogue. The contacts directory lists them all.
Drafts
An item City Council is still writing is invisible until it is published, so what you see in the catalogue is what you can buy today. There is no "coming soon" state, deliberately.
Next
What a price means, then your basket.
Not what you were after?
Ask City Council in the bubble at the corner of any page, or open your help conversation in full. It is one conversation that never closes, so there is nothing to raise and no subject line to invent.