Croydon Council has released a care leavers app to support what they now term as “care-experienced young people” – care leavers – who are taking their first steps towards independent living.
The council claims that Croydon Cares “has been co-designed and developed by care-experienced young people to provide vital information and advice on money, finance, housing and accommodation, as well as health and wellbeing”.
Croydon Council has a pretty dismal record with its use of outward-facing technology.
Such as when they paid at least £500,000 to a developer with no previous track record for the Crap App for waste and fly-tipping issues. The app never functioned properly and was a cost to the council when opensource options were available free of charge.
The Crap App was so bad, it had to be replaced in 2018 with a marginally better functioning Crap App 2.0.
Or the dreadfully dull, under-researched, unchecked music heritage trail app, delivered at huge expense but which hardly anyone bothered to download. And then there was the Croydon Digital team dabbling in procuring “smart” bus shelters…
Croydon Cares may not be such a flop. It has been developed by a small family company based in Bournemouth, This Is Focus Ltd, who have basically re-skinned a similar smartphone tool that they have already produced for other local authorities, including Brighton and Hove, Greater Manchester (where it has been in used since 2022), Hounslow and Medway.
There was a “launch event” staged at Fisher’s Folly this week, attended by Mark Riddell, the national implementation adviser for care leavers, where some young people, who are also Young Ambassadors and members of the Children in Care Council, spoke about how the app had been designed collaboratively.
“This app empowers us young people with the tools we need to thrive, including support with financial issues and smart budgeting tools,” one of the care leavers said, apparently unprompted.
“This app is going to shape a better Croydon by creating more support for the young people using it. It’s got a really user-friendly design and layout which makes it easy to use. It also gives us users the right professional connections for work.”
Jason Perry, the Mayor of Croydon, has just closed four public libraries, he wants to close down the Youth Engagement Team and has designs on closing at least one nursery school in the borough. But yesterday, he is supposed to have said: “Our children and young people deserve every opportunity to thrive, learn and fulfil their potential.”
Perry, clearly, is an irony-free zone.
Mayor Perry called Croydon Cares “this fantastic app”, and said that it “will benefit care-experienced young people throughout our borough”.
Sounding just a bit like Young Mr Grace, Perry said: “Well done to everyone involved.” Which suggests he had nothing to do with it.
The Croydon Cares app is available, free of charge, on the Apple App Store.
Read more: Council kills off the crap app – after wasting up to £500,000
Read more: Council puts the ‘sham’ into ‘shambolic’ over 4 closed libraries
Read more: After six months doing nothing, Perry sets nurseries’ deadline
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Please can you stop referring to the term care-experienced in quotes as it makes it sound cynical and negative. There is incredible stigma around being care-experienced and those who have been in care are known to have worse life outcomes than those who haven’t. I’m all for criticising the council where it’s due (and there’s plenty of things to criticise them for) but this isn’t one of them.
1, Our scepticism of the language used by those in authority in no way reflects on any of those who have survived the care system.
2, We have a long, and continuing, policy of highlightling the pomposity and verbosity of councilspeak, of which this is a new example.
3, If the more concise term “care leavers” is good enough for Mark Riddell, “the national implementation adviser for care leavers”, then it really ought to be good enough for Croydon Council.
Quite right IC! It used to be ‘people leaving care’ and other unhelpful terms. Back in the ‘eighties, the thinking was that people should be called ‘people’ – old people, young people and not old and young. This was supposed to be more dignified. Trouble is, these were terms imposed top down by sociology graduates … no one asked the people themselves ..