Provision of Glow Blogs Services for Education Scotland

Education Scotland has a requirement to place a contract with an external service provider for ongoing support and development of the Glow Blogs service. Glow is Scotland's national digital environment that offers a number of different services to support learning and teaching across the curriculum. Glow Blogs is a service that is available to all Glow users to allow them to create, manage and host websites. It is currently a fully managed WordPress multisite environment which resides on an AWS infrastructure. There are around 160,000 sites in the environment and an average of 130,000 daily page views. These sites may, for example, be private and used by learners recording their work or be public for schools to share resources. The service offers users a selection of themes and plugins that have educational value and these must be kept up to date and sometimes customised with factors such as safeguarding in mind. The AWS infrastructure has a provided a high level of reliability and was designed to be flexible with features such as auto-scaling used. A high level of reliability and flexibility is required due to ever changing user requirements. This has been evidenced by the move to remote working as a result of COVID-19. The WordPress application provides a selection of themes and plugins that provide functionality based on user requirements. Both the infrastructure and application continue to be improved by taking an Agile approach to development and making changes based on user stories. It is expected that any potential service provider would have sufficient technical knowledge and an understanding of how such a service should be best provided and maintained. It is anticipated that the current offering of Glow Blogs through a WordPress multisite hosted in AWS will continue to be how the service is provided. However, Education Scotland would also consider alternative ways of providing the service, such as a subscription based SaaS model. We would ask that the migration of data is covered in the response if an alternative approach is suggested. Education Scotland would wish to meet with potential bidders in order to seek views and information from the marketplace on the requirement. Details of this process are set out in Section VI.3 - Additional Information.