As the new school year gets underway, kids will be doing more than just showing off their new uniforms. They will also be comparing notes on what they did over the school holidays.

While some will talk about the trips they went away on or the relatives who visited, others will wax lyrical about the coding camps they attended and all the fun they had learning great new skills. Any time one of your kids visits one of them they may be given a quick (or not so quick) demo of what their friends have learned.

Naturally, FOMO will kick in at this point and there is good reason for this, since learning coding skills is not just a way to have fun, but to develop technical skills that could be very useful later on, especially for anyone looking to pursue STEM subjects at school and beyond and potentially as a career. Kids can learn coding from as early as five.

However, they haven’t necessarily missed the boat; we run half-term coding camps in London, so there will be another chance.

Coding camps based in London can also be a good way of ensuring kids from all backgrounds are not disadvantaged compared with those who live in affluent places in the Home Counties. In those areas, there have been numerous summer coding camps and even some that are being held at the start of the new term.

The key point is that it is not just in the summer holidays that your kids can spend time coding. Of course, there is no reason not to plan ahead for August 2025, but for those who just cannot wait that long, booking them into a camp this half term will give them something great to look forward to and will mean they can enjoy having the same skills as their friends.