Hwb Educational Platform for Wales

Description

The Welsh Government is issuing this prior information notice to communicate its intention to re-procure the Hwb web platform which provides access to bilingual education content, resources and digital tools and services. Lot 1: The Welsh Government remains committed to delivering a national approach to digital services, enabling maintained schools in Wales to maximize the transformational benefits of digital and technology in education. Our vision is to ‘Embrace innovation to transform digital education in Wales’. By harnessing cutting-edge, bilingual digital technology, we aim to create a personalised, safe, agile, and interconnected ecosystem that equips practitioners and schools to prepare learners to thrive in a rapidly evolving global digital society. The Hwb platform is the Welsh Government’s strategic digital channel to support delivering the Curriculum for Wales. It provides education stakeholders with a secure, single point of access to a plethora of bilingual content, resources, and digital tools and services. As a national digital service, we support over 1480 maintained schools, with over 450,000 learners, 55,000 practitioners, and a range of education professionals across the schools’ sector in Wales. The Hwb web platform will need to be accessed by learners, practitioners, and potentially parents. Therefore, we need a service that is customisable to individual users’ needs and preferences. The web platform will need to integrate with a central Entra ID identity service to support different user groups accessing specific content when logged in, as well as allowing public users to access public-facing content. The web platform will need to support standard website functionality, including but not limited to, a content management solution, news, and event management. A key deliverable is to provide a single resource repository supporting the creation and sharing of dynamic and interactive content, resources, assessments/quizzes hosted locally or by accredited partners. The repository will need to support a range of formats from static/interactive resources to immersive VR and AR formats. It is essential the web platform can respond to the evolving needs of schools and embrace opportunities from emerging technology. Our wider Hwb cloud service enables users to access online tools and resources anywhere, anytime, from various web-enabled devices. It provides an integrated platform allowing schools to easily access Microsoft 365, Google for Education, and Apple Classroom tools and services. The web platform will need to support interoperability with these services to ensure resources can be utilised easily as part of lesson planning within virtual classrooms. The platform will need to support a seamless gateway for users to access relevant tools and services through Single Sign-On, using a role-based access control model. The Welsh Government embraces a cloud-first approach and seeks to procure a software as a service (SaaS) solution. The successful bidder will need to design the web platform to our specific requirements, ensuring it is user-centered, bilingual, and fully accessible per the latest WGAC AA standards. The service should embrace secure by design and support simplified code, so content can be published easily and efficiently by our teams. The service will need to be flexible to adapt to the fast-moving and ever-changing technology landscape and provide a gateway to the plethora of services and education technology opportunities delivered by Welsh Government. During the most recent academic year, the existing web platform has supported an average of approximately 3.5 million logins each month. Activity can vary significantly throughout the year, so the service will need to deliver dynamic scaling and full resilience. Our aim is for this service to future-proof the Hwb platform and ensure it’s recognised by educators as the single gateway to meet all their digital education needs for many years to come. The successful bidder has an opportunity to provide a digital service that positively impacts the lives of children in Wales.. We invite potential suppliers and stakeholders to a virtual early market engagement event for our upcoming procurement. Join us to discuss the procurement plan, share your expertise, and help shape the service requirements. Your input will be invaluable in identifying innovative solutions. The event is on Monday, 24th March. Please register your interest by Thursday, 20th March 2025.