Science, Innovation and Technology Committee
Oral evidence: Innovation showcase, HC 523
Tuesday 3 February 2026
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 3 February 2026.
Members present: Dame Chi Onwurah (Chair); George Freeman; Samantha Niblett; Dr Lauren Sullivan; Daniel Zeichner.
Questions 50 - 51
Witness
I: Rose Lord, Founder and Creative Director, My Best Mood.
Witness: Rose Lord.
Chair: Good morning and welcome to our innovation showcase. The Committee wants to understand how the UK supports innovation and what more can be done. To inform our work, we select an innovator to share their story before our main evidence session each week. This week, Samantha Niblett suggested our innovator. Samantha.
Q50 Samantha Niblett: Thank you very much, Chair. I am delighted that my very first innovator is, unsurprisingly to everybody I am sure, a female founder. Rose Lord is the founder and creative director of My Best Mood, an Innovate UK funded wellbeing and creative literacy innovation for children. Rose brings a rare combination of lived experience and professional expertise. Diagnosed dyslexic at the age of seven, she has first-hand experience of how early labels can define expectations. Despite academic challenges, Rose represented Great Britain as an elite rhythmic gymnast and holds two British titles, experiences that shaped her resilience and growth mindset to focus on strengths not limitations.
Professionally, Rose is an award-winning innovator with a background in strategic engagement and service transformation across health, technology and the public sector. Today, she is here to share evidence and explain her Innovate UK-backed project, a preventive app that supports children’s creativity, literacy and emotional awareness.
Rose Lord: Children do not want to be fixed and every child has emotional needs. This was a clear finding from our independent research with over 160 families. Children want to belong. They want to feel understood, valued and supported in a way that works for them. But right now, most children cannot access that level of tailored, preventive support.
Our project is strategically grounded in the wider evidence. It is claimed right now that reading standards have improved but, actually, only a third of children enjoy reading. Social, emotional and mental health needs are the fastest-growing concern within SEN. In one single autumn term, 11.5 million learning days were lost. One in five children are persistently absent from school post covid. More frighteningly, one in five children aged eight to 16 have a probable mental health disorder. These are not just numbers; these are children. This reflects a system that cannot keep pace. The impact is increasingly significant. Parents are often unable to work, creating a wider economic burden extending beyond both education and health. That is the gap that My Best Mood hopes to help fill.
So, what is My Best Mood? It is an app-based, digital creative space designed to help children build confidence, access literacy and develop emotional awareness without requiring a diagnosis or label. Children have such rich imaginations and powerful ideas, but struggle sometimes when words are hard. Our app helps to remove those barriers. Through storytelling, reflection and drawing, children can turn their thoughts and feelings into things that they can be proud of.
We are using technology responsibly. The app adapts to the child, their age and interests, and how regulated they are right there in that moment. We support literacy development by using proven, evidence-led accessibility tools, including read-aloud functionality, visual background adjustments and what we think will be a game changer in reading fluency: bionic reading methods. The AI is used only gently and responsibly within the app, not to speak to the child but to support them in finding their own voice.
We hear more at the moment about creativity and play-based learning, but that has always been fundamental to learning development. This does not stop in early childhood. All brains learn best when curiosity and imagination are allowed to lead. Creativity is very much the heartland of My Best Mood.
How are we evidencing what we do with safety and prevention? My Best Mood is grounded in positive psychology and growth mindset principles. It is shaped by what families told us they need, and guided by experts in psychology coaching, inclusion and safeguarding. It is prevention by design.
We are being very responsible in how we approach this, at a time of real concern about children’s online digital experiences. It has been designed deliberately not to replicate social media dynamics. There are no feeds, likes or social comparisons. It is a guided, private and creative space developed in line with the Children’s Code and Online Safety Act. We ensure that we work with regulation, not around it.
Of course, it is Innovate UK that has made all of this possible so far, not just financially but through mentorship. The funding enabled research, access to specialist expertise and, recently, attracted some early press interest. This work has been possible only because I was introduced early to a business support innovation growth specialist, Jude Hough, whose guidance has been instrumental. The combination of funding and guidance is what has made a real difference to the progress we have made so far rather than it quietly falling away. Early-stage innovation like this can be very isolating. You need someone to hear you; you need someone to challenge you; and you need someone to help you navigate the complexity. That has been critical to our progress so far.
What do we need next? Thanks to Innovate UK support, we are now ready to move from early innovation into real-world impact, but our priority is simple. It is to get this app into the hands of children and families who need it most, safely, securely and sustainably. We have our first excited school lined up to support with our beta testing, which is great news. But what we need next is continued access to funding and specialist expertise, and support with a funded testing and evaluation phase to demonstrate what our real-world impact really looks like. For start-up innovators like me, the challenge is not always just building the solution when you have a pipeline of ideas. Accessing schools and health systems outside existing procurement pathways is what would really accelerate our progress.
Turning to the impact that this can have at a time when families and public systems are under strain, evidence-led, preventive innovation should be part of the solution. To support children earlier, My Best Mood would aim to reduce the reliance on reactive, high-cost pathways by supporting literacy, building confidence and helping children make sense of how their inner world feels before challenges become crisis. This is preventive support. We believe that prevention is where long-term societal and economic value can be created.
To close, we feel that children should not need diagnosis to access support that helps them find their voice and to make sense of how they feel. Every child has emotional needs. This is why prevention and access matter. Children want to belong. They want to feel understood, valued and supported in a way that works for them. Children do not want to be fixed. Thank you.
Q51 Chair: Thank you very much, Rose Lord. That is very inspiring and chimes deeply with the views that I know many Committee members share with regard to childhood and the opportunities that technology can bring. As you so eloquently put it, those opportunities are around empowerment for the child in supporting them to express their own potential and thoughts. That is really interesting and has given us some things to think about. It is a real pleasure to have you here as our innovator this week.
Rose Lord: Thank you very much. It has been a privilege.