London Borough of Harrow

Social Solving: A life cycle programme helping young people and families to help themselves and others.

A programme that provides a set of integrated, managed services, underpinned by joining the Council’s professional youth services teams, with a technology platform that provides anytime anywhere access and mobile apps that gives an engaging and retaining digital experience.

Enabling young people to build trust, gain confidence, become more independent, giving them access to services when they need them . Addressing the real issues they are experiencing and fundamentally reducing council costs by reducing interventions.

The apps have been co-designed by the young people in Harrow that will use the services and a highly experienced mobile app development partner using thought leadership and proven best practice. Discussions with other authorities and agencies had indicated there would be wider interest in adopting a service and tool such as this.

Discovery evidence

The aim was to provide a mobile based solution that embeds positive behavioural change (e.g. consequential thinking, addressing cognitive deficiencies, increased emotional resilience etc.) in supporting existing physical intervention delivered by practitioners.

After identifying that the priority groups that would benefit from such a solution were young people on the edge of care and first time young offenders, young people from these groups and practitioners who work with them were engaged in focus sessions to explore what they would want from an app and what would motivate them to use it. A working prototype was then developed by an experienced private sector partner using an agile methodology. A comprehensive business case detailing the financial and intangible benefits has been developed but is not currently publically available to link to because of the sensitivity of some information. This can be provided.

There would be a small running cost to maintain the applications, particularly to ensure that content remains current and relevant, and this would benefit from being shared between multiple authorities.