BUSINESS owners, teaching professionals and volunteers took part in an event at the National Cyber Skills Centre in Malvern to support the programme for teaching primary school children computer coding.

Code Club is a not-for-profit nationwide network of volunteer-led after school coding clubs aimed at 9 – 11 year olds. The fun learning activity devised to teach primary school children computer coding was developed in London, where it quickly took off. There are now 2148 Code Clubs in the UK, with 30,000 children participating including more than 200 clubs in the Midlands area alone. Locally, it has been championed by Guy Mucklow, chief executive of technology specialists Postcode Anywhere, which is based in Diglis, Worcester, and the West Midlands regional coordinator for the Computing at Schools network is John Palmer, who is also faculty leader for IT and business at The Chase school in Malvern..

Mr. Palmer attended a Code Club networking event in 2013 at Postcode Anywhere and now uses his influence to spread the word in Malvern, having forged strong links with local technology companies and primary teaching professionals.

He said: “The event presented an opportunity for people involved in Code Club to share both best practice and learning resources with each other. It has also created the opportunity for interested parties such as teaching professionals and potential volunteers who would like to get involved in Code Club, to find out a little more about it. The commitment to Code Club in the Malvern area has been phenomenal with ten local primary schools now participating in the after school activity. The support from local business such as Malvern Instruments, Borwell, QinetiQ and UTC Aerospace has been very strong, and they realise that we must work in partnership to nurture the next generation of Malvern’s brilliant brains to ultimately enable the UK to compete with the rest of the world.”