We were devastated to lose our co-founder Ann when she was killed in a cycle crash in 2024.
For the past 30 years, Crick Software has been a family for the many people who have walked through our doors. Ann has, and will always be, at the heart of that family – as a leader, mentor, colleague, and a very dear friend.
It’s quite extraordinary just how many lives Ann has touched; in addition to being a much-loved wife, mother, and grandmother, Ann’s work at Crick has transformed the lives of millions of children around the world.
Ann was a pioneering champion of inclusion – she wanted to give every child a voice, and the opportunity to actively participate and succeed alongside their peers. When Ann & John won the Bett Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022, it came as no surprise to the many teachers, advocates and advisors who they have worked tirelessly with every day to support and empower.
Ann was passionate about her work – she spoke at conferences all over the world, not about a product, but about how she used Clicker in her classroom, and what other teachers are now doing in theirs.
She was a rare combination: an ideas person AND a details person. Ideas often crystalized in the shower - one morning she emerged from the shower and told John that she’d worked out a new way to use Clicker to help children with non-fiction writing. Almost before she was dry, she was getting her ideas down on paper, and two years later the Find Out & Write About series won the Bett Educational Technology Award.
Ann was always adamant that it was the teachers who knew their children best, who made the magic in those classrooms - it was our job to ensure that tools like Clicker helped them to do what they do best.
Ann was also incredibly kind, funny, driven, fiercely intelligent, fantastically good company at every party, and always on-the-go, putting in more miles for our charity fitness challenge than many of us combined!
Ann had a passion for the great outdoors. Holidays when the children were young were spent visiting family in Ireland, or camping in the mountains, taking long walks and baking potatoes in the campfire. When the business started to do well, the whole family thought they were really posh when they graduated to a pre-erected Eurocamp tent in the Alps!
Ann was driven – she did nothing by halves. When the family learned to ski, every minute of the day was spent on the piste. When they went walking in the Lake District, they would often return just in time for a late dinner, having set off after breakfast. And when she got into cycling, she loved to go off for weeks at a time cycle touring in Europe.
Ann went everywhere on foot, by bike, or using public transport, wanting to reduce her carbon footprint and help make the world a better place.
She was a voracious reader of literary fiction, devouring books at an astonishing pace. She loved the theatre, often heading for the National, always followed with a meal at her favourite Indian vegetarian restaurant where you take your own wine and get a meal for around £10.
More than anything, she loved spending time with her grandchildren, whether it was reading, playing shops, building dens, or running round the garden.
She was a force of nature, and a force for good, and would no doubt be horribly embarrassed by all this praise! But there’s really no way to overstate what Ann has achieved, and what she has been to us.
We miss her very much.