We treat everyone in an honest and ethical way, and we take our social responsibilities seriously:
- We are champions of struggling students and those with special needs.
- We make our products as accessible as possible to users of alternative input methods, including eye gaze and switches.
- We conduct all our business with honesty and integrity.
- We ensure that the company contributes to the wellbeing of the communities in which we operate.
Our environmental credentials
- Wherever possible we use online meetings with schools and districts rather than traveling.
- The refurbishment of our head office building won a Green Apple Award and we’ve made further improvements to reduce our energy use.
- We buy certified offsets from Forest Carbon to offset all our carbon emissions.
- In 2023, we installed 90 solar panels on our head office roof, which generate as much energy as we use over a year.
Community support: YHA
YHA has been championing affordable adventures since 1930. With hostels across England and Wales in the UK, they help people - especially children and young people - access the outdoors, build confidence, and enjoy new experiences. They also work closely with schools and communities to make sure no one misses out due to cost or circumstance.
Ann was a passionate advocate for inclusion, always striving to give every child the chance to thrive. Her work at Crick changed lives, and her legacy continues to inspire us.
If you’d like to support YHA in her memory, you can donate here:
Community support: The Lowdown
In 2024 we chose The Lowdown as our charity of the year.
The Lowdown provides free and confidential support services for 11 - 25-year-olds in Northamptonshire and believes that no young person should ever experience mental health issues alone. They offer a caring environment where young people are always supported on their journey towards positive emotional health and wellbeing.
The Lowdown works with young people to provide accessible, safe, welcoming, confidential and non-judgemental services including:
- Counselling
- Information, Advice & Advocacy
- Wellbeing
- LGBTQ+
- Youth Groups
- Sexual Health
The Lowdown’s work is vital to thousands of young people in Northamptonshire, so the team felt strongly that they should receive our support.
Over the course of the year we raised £2,532 (over $3,000) through activities such as a duvet day raffle, a sponsored walk, a company bake sale, a Christmas jumper day, and a festive buffet.
Community support: KidsAid
KidsAid is on the front line of a growing mental health crisis, with referrals to their team more than doubling since the start of the pandemic.
Through the mediums of art, dance, drama, and play, their fantastic team of therapists support children of all ages struggling with bereavement, illness, neglect, bullying, abuse, family breakdown, and other traumatic circumstances.
We were highly impressed by KidsAid’s extensive therapy programme for parents and caregivers too, giving each child the best possible chance to break intergenerational trauma and move forward with their lives.
During 2022 and 2023, we raised a fantastic total of £6,398 (over $8,000) for KidsAid through a range of fundraising activities including: cake sales, gifting items for the therapy room, raising money at our TES SEN London Show raffle, our colleague Celia’s incredibly brave abseil down the National Lift Tower, Christmas jumper day and sponsored gift wrapping!
Community support: Filling in the Blanks
For 2021, we were proud to work with US charity, Filling in the Blanks who are based in Norwalk, Connecticut. They provide food bags for thousands of children who suffer from food insecurity.
For these children, weekends, summer breaks, and snow days can be unsettling. They may not know where their next meal is coming from – and the COVID pandemic has only exacerbated these fears. Filling in the Blanks works to relieve these worries by ensuring that these children have nutritious meals.
We had lots of ideas to raise money throughout the year, some of our favorite fundraisers included a Halloween quiz, a virtual 5k walk, their holiday backpack drive, an Ugly Sweater Day, and a virtual food drive.
Despite frequent lockdowns and working from home mandates, we managed to raise over $2,000!
Community support: Magic Breakfast
With children’s education at the heart of everything we do, it only made sense for us to support an education-oriented charity. For 2020, we chose to make Magic Breakfast our charity of the year.
Magic Breakfast works with 480 Primary, Secondary, Special Educational Needs schools and Pupil Referral Units to provide healthy breakfasts to ensure that more than 48,000 vulnerable children across the UK start their school day in the best possible way.
Children in Magic Breakfast schools make on average the equivalent of two months’ additional progress compared to children who do not have breakfast at all. This is not only because breakfast gives children the energy to learn in the morning, but because of the valuable social experience that a breakfast club provides.1
Throughout 2020, we ran several events in support of Magic Breakfast. In February, we organized a breakfast club for staff members in the UK and US offices, which was an excellent opportunity to catch up with each other.
During the COVID pandemic, we had to adapt our fundraising plans. In spite of this, we were still able to organize an Easter quiz, a virtual pumpkin carving competition, and a Christmas jumper day! One of our ongoing efforts was a ‘Book Swap’ campaign. In December we took part in the Big Give initiative, which doubled all the donations we made.
1 Education Endowment Foundation. (2019). Magic Breakfast | Projects. [online] Available at: https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/projects-and-evaluation/projects/magic-breakfast/#research-results.
Community support: Hope Centre
The Hope Centre is an organization based in Northampton that works to improve the lives of anyone affected by poverty, especially homelessness. Since its foundation in 1974, it has worked with tens of thousands of people in Northampton.
The Hope Centre:
- provides practical services that help people to survive poverty and homelessness;
- helps people to leave poverty and homelessness through training and skills to improve employability;
- campaigns against poverty, negative attitudes and poor treatment towards people experiencing homelessness and poverty.
Because of cuts to social services over the last few years, more and more people have been utilising services like foodbanks.2 We wanted to work with the Hope Centre to support their invaluable work helping those in our community who are most affected by the problems caused by poverty and homelessness.
In late 2018, we started with a few collection boxes for our staff to donate supplies to the Hope Centre, such as food and clothing. Due to the overwhelming success of this initiative, we nominated the Hope Centre to be our ‘charity of the year’ for 2019. In addition to the collection boxes, we also organised several company events to raise money.
We put our baking skills to the test for the Crick Software Bake Off and channelled our inner artists for a Pumpkin Carving Competition. Our Marketing Manager also successfully completed five 5k races across Northamptonshire. By the end of 2019, we had raised over £1,000 for the Hope Centre.
