2015 was an exciting year for Code Club. For anyone keen to find out more about our progress and growth over the past year, we have complied an annual report, which you can download a copy of here or view our handy summary below…
CODE CLUB IN THE UK
During 2015, Code Clubs have been created in a further 1295 schools, libraries and community venues in the UK, bringing the total number to 3472 by the end of December 2015.
We’re working hard to ensure children from all regions and backgrounds have access to Code Club – at the moment the regions we are strongest in are the North West, East Anglia, London and the South East.
With an average of 14 children per club, Code Club is currently reaching over 75,000 children – including 40% girls. We hope these girls will continue their Computing journey in secondary school and that this will help close the GCSE and A-Level Computing gender gap.
In 2015 we began to increase the numbers of Code Clubs set in libraries. We also developed a partnership with the Society of Chief Librarians to support the Digital strand of their Universal Learning Offer.
YEAR IN REVIEW
Code Club join forces with Raspberry Pi
Our biggest news of the year was our merger with the Raspberry Pi Foundation, which will see our two organisations working together to help many more young people learn how to build their ideas with code.
Evaluating our impact
In the Spring term we began an evaluation process with the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER). The aim of the evaluation is to explore the impact of Code Club on pupils’ coding and computing skills, as well as the development of transferable skills and their attitudes and aspirations towards coding and computing.
As part of the evaluation, children were asked to complete a coding quiz, attitude survey and computational thinking challenge at the start of the programme, and they will complete them again in July 2016, so that their progress can be assessed. We will be publicising the results of this first assessment in Autumn 2016.
Updates to the Code Club website
Over the summer term, we re-designed the Code Club Projects site, adding loads of useful info about the specific skills that are covered in our projects and lots of other lovely educational stuff. We streamlined our registration process and adjusted the way that volunteers, club hosts and children in clubs access our projects page, introducing the Club ID and PIN system.
These changes helped to ensure that all Code Clubs were registered on our site, which allowed us to monitor the increase of our club numbers and to ensure that we:
- measure our impact to find out how well we’re doing and what can be done better
- know who is running our Code Clubs, and ensure that our volunteers are appropriately checked to ensure child safety
- measure our reach so we can secure funding to help us continue to develop and provide free resources and support for our volunteers
TEACHER TRAINING PROGRAMME
In autumn we implemented some changes to our Teacher Training programme which has reached over 1300 teachers across the UK. We updated the Teacher Training materials, focussing on creating more interactive sessions to increase participation from the teachers.
The new sessions are:
- Computational Thinking: an introduction to computer science concepts, maze based practical application for KS1 computing elements, and lesson ideas for cross curricular computing
- Programming: using scratch to create a chatbot, interactive learning for the KS2 programming aspects and unplugged ideas for classroom activities.
- Networks and the Internet: learning to use HTML (the ‘language’ of websites), how the internet actually works and the principles of searching the web.
Sessions are now free at the point of access for teachers. Teachers can register for training through our website and we will set up the session as and when we secure funding. As a not-for-profit, we rely on financial support to run our teacher training programme – and we hope this new approach will offer more opportunities to reach more teachers and children across the UK.
CODE CLUB AROUND THE WORLD
Code Club has grown internationally over the past year. We have brought on board four countries which already have an established presence and activity – with a significant number of Code Clubs being run. These are Australia, New Zealand, Brazil and Ukraine who between them run over 700 Code Clubs.
In September we ran our first application process for new countries to join the Code Club family. We welcomed Country Coordinators for another four countries – Poland, France, Spain and Canada – who will be looking to establish more Code Clubs and secure funding for their operations.
2016 AND BEYOND
In the next year, Code Club will accelerate their growth to continue to increase the number of clubs in the UK. We will launch new campaigns to help raise awareness of Code Club’s activity with the general public. We’ll continue to create new special projects and activities for children, teachers and volunteers.
During 2016 and beyond we will seek to strengthen the focus of the Teacher Training programme and build school and teacher engagement. We will deliver a comprehensive programme of CPD to primary teachers, and, in response to teacher demand, will provide more activity ideas and cross curricular work.
We will be working next year to continue Code Club’s global growth. We have invited 10 countries to apply for Code Club’s second cohort in our international onboarding programme, which will begin early next year. We will also organise our first ever Global Summit, where the Code Club community across the world will meet for the first time.
as then attended a local Code Club meetup in Derby, and was convinced to start up a club in her children’s school. While chatting in the school playground, Jas also managed to convince her friend Amanda to help her run the club. 
For Jas, running a Code Club has brought a whole list of benefits, which has now moved beyond her initial aims of keeping her children entertained in the holidays;
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