How to choose an online coding club

By The Code Zone team · 28 July 2026 · 9 min read

First, are you sure you need to pay at all?

Worth saying before anything else, because nobody selling clubs ever does. The free options in this country are genuinely good, not the consolation prize. Code Club and CoderDojo run volunteer-led sessions all over the UK, the Raspberry Pi Foundation's project library is lovely and costs nothing, and Scratch itself is free forever. If your child is quite happily making things and rarely gets stuck for long, that might be all they need. There's also a fair bit you can do yourself with no technical knowledge whatsoever.

What you're paying for, when you do pay, is somebody being there at the exact moment your child is stuck and nobody at home can help. That moment turns up a few weeks in for almost every child, and it's where most children's coding quietly stops. Everything below is really just a way of finding out whether a club solves that, or whether it sells lessons and hopes for the best.

1. How many children per mentor, really?

Ask for the ratio, not the class size. "Small groups" means nothing on its own. A club with twelve children and two adults will describe itself exactly the same way as one with six and one. What you want to know is how many children one mentor is looking after at once, because that's what decides how long your child sits with their hand up.

Then ask the follow-up nobody expects: what happens if the group turns out not to suit my child? Not the level, the group. Groups develop their own character, some chatty and boisterous, some quiet and heads-down, and a child who isn't settling in one can be perfectly happy in another. You want to hear that moving them is easy and normal, rather than a whole conversation.

2. Do they follow a curriculum, or build their own thing?

Both can work and they suit different children, but clubs are often vague here because the honest answer is a curriculum. The question that settles it: what happens if my child wants to build something that isn't this week's project? If the answer is that they can do that at home, it's a curriculum.

It matters more than it sounds, because a child who's building their own game will push through frustration that would end a worksheet in about four minutes.

3. What happens if my child needs three weeks on something the others do in one?

This is the most revealing question on the list, and it's worth asking even if your child races ahead at everything.

The answer you want is some version of "nothing happens, that's just how it works". The answer that should worry you is "we'd give them some extra support", because it means there's a track everyone's meant to be on and your child would be behind it. If falling behind exists as a concept, it's a classroom wearing a different hat.

Ask it the other way round too. If the work turns out to be too easy, does anything actually change, and how quickly? A child who's bored for a month has usually left before anyone notices they were bored.

4. Is it live, and is it the same person every week?

Live sessions and recorded content both exist, both are legitimate, and they cost very different amounts. The problem is that some providers sell recorded content with a support inbox in language that sounds live, so just ask straight out: is there a person on the call for the whole session?

Then ask whether it's the same person each week, because that one gets overlooked and it matters enormously. A mentor who remembers what your child was building last Tuesday, and that they went quiet when they got stuck on the collision detection, is a completely different service from a rota. Children get attached to their mentor. That's not a soft benefit, it's most of why they keep turning up.

5. How will I know how they're getting on?

You won't be in the room, which is the bit parents find hardest about online clubs. So ask what actually comes back to you, and be specific about it: after a session, does anyone write anything down about my child?

"You can email us any time" isn't an answer. What you're listening for is whether somebody is paying enough attention to each individual child to have something to say about them afterwards. If a club can't tell you what your child did last week, nobody was really watching.

6. Are staff DBS-checked, and can I read the safeguarding policy?

Ask to read it, rather than to be told it exists. Anyone working with children should send it over without any hesitation at all. For online sessions, ask specifically how they handle one-to-one contact, chat and recording, because that's where online clubs differ most from one another.

7. How do you actually support an autistic or ADHD child?

Ask this even if your child is neither, because how a club answers it tells you how they treat any child who's having a hard time.

You're listening for specifics, and for whether it sounds practised or improvised. Can a child keep their camera off? Can they type instead of speaking while they build up to it? What happens when someone needs to step away in the middle of a session? Can the pace genuinely be theirs, or is that an exception somebody has to request? "We're very inclusive" is not an answer to any of those. We've written separately about what works and what goes wrong.

8. Can we try before paying, and what does the taster involve?

Any decent club offers a free taster with no card details. If one won't let your child sit in a real session first, do wonder why.

It's worth asking what happens before the taster as well as during it. Does anyone speak to you first about your child, or are they just dropped into whichever session had a space? Those are two quite different levels of care, and you can tell them apart in one phone call.

Then during the session, watch your child rather than the mentor. You'll know inside twenty minutes whether they're absorbed or being managed.

9. Where can I read reviews you can't edit?

The testimonials on any club's own website were chosen by that club. Ask where the independent ones live: Reviews.io, Trustpilot, Google. Then read the three and four star ones rather than the fives, because that's where you find out what a place is like on a bad week.

Our answers, since it'd be a bit odd not to give them

We run online clubs, so obviously we're not a neutral party here and you should read all of the above knowing that. But it would be strange to write this and not answer our own questions, so here they are, and you're very welcome to hold us to them.

• Ratio: a maximum of six children per mentor. And if a group isn't right for your child, we move them. Groups really do turn out very different from one another, and a child who isn't settling in one is often completely fine in another. It's no bother to move, so please do ask rather than sitting on it. And plenty of children would far rather stay exactly where they are, which is equally fine. Nothing gets forced.
• Curriculum or their own thing: their own games, all the way through. They work up through levels rather than a fixed weekly plan, so nobody's waiting for anybody.
• Three weeks on one thing: nothing happens. And if something's too easy, their mentor bumps them up a level. Levels move down as readily as up here, with no fuss made about it either way, because the point is that the work fits.
• Live, and the same mentor: Game Dev Club and Advanced are live, with the same mentor each week. Children do get attached to theirs, and we take that seriously when we're arranging groups.
• Knowing how they're getting on: every mentor writes a note on every child after every single session. What they built, whether they got stuck, whether they showed their game to the group. It's the quiet thing we do that we've never really said out loud, and it's why we can tell you what your child did last Tuesday.
• Safeguarding: every mentor is DBS-checked and STEM-certified, and the policies are on the site for you to read whenever you like.
• Neurodivergent children: a lot of our members are autistic, ADHD, or just don't get on with how school does things. In 2025 we received the Autism Inclusion Award from the National Autistic Society, which is worth more than anything we could tell you about ourselves. Cameras can stay off for as long as they want. They can type in the chat instead of speaking. We adapt to the child rather than the other way round, and we've been doing it long enough to be specific about how. That cuts both ways, though. If something we'd suggest is more upheaval than it's worth, we drop it. Moving groups is the obvious one: it helps some children enormously and for others a new group means new faces, a new voice and a broken routine, and that costs more than whatever we were trying to fix. Nothing here is ever forced on a child.
• Trying first: a free taster, no card details. One of our mentors rings you beforehand to find out a bit about your child, so we can put them in the right session rather than just the next empty one.
• Reviews: independently collected and verified on Reviews.io. Do read the middling ones.

And what it costs, plainly

We'll be direct about this, because we get a lot of calls from parents who've been guessing. There are three memberships:

• Game Dev Academy, £25 a month. Self-paced rather than live. Your child works through games in their own time with mentor support by text and video message. Ages 6 to 16.
• Game Dev Club, £65 a month. A live weekly session with the same mentor, in a group of no more than six, plus everything in the Academy. Scratch through to Python. Ages 6 to 16.
• Game Dev Advanced, £85 a month. The same live weekly format for children who've moved on to Python, TypeScript and JavaScript. Ages 10 and up.

There are discounts for paying in 3, 6 or 12 month blocks on the live memberships. If money's the deciding factor, say so when you call. We'd much rather put a child in the Academy than lose them entirely.

And if the answers you get from somebody else are better than ours, please go with them. A child in the right club somewhere else is a far better outcome than a child in the wrong club with us. Book a taster if you'd like to see what we're like.