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Important update from TheSchoolRun

For the past 13 years, TheSchoolRun has been run by a small team of mums working from home, dedicated to providing quality educational resources to primary school parents. Unfortunately, rising supplier costs and falling revenue have made it impossible for us to continue operating, and we’ve had to make the difficult decision to close. The good news: We’ve arranged for another educational provider to take over many of our resources. These will be hosted on a new portal, where the content will be updated and expanded to support your child’s learning.

What this means for subscribers:

  • Your subscription is still active, and for now, you can keep using the website as normal — just log in with your usual details to access all our articles and resources*.
  • In a few months, all resources will move to the new portal. You’ll continue to have access there until your subscription ends. We’ll send you full details nearer the time.
  • As a thank you for your support, we’ll also be sending you 16 primary school eBooks (worth £108.84) to download and keep.

A few changes to be aware of:

  • The Learning Journey weekly email has ended, but your child’s plan will still be updated on your dashboard each Monday. Just log in to see the recommended worksheets.
  • The 11+ weekly emails have now ended. We sent you all the remaining emails in the series at the end of March — please check your inbox (and spam folder) if you haven’t seen them. You can also follow the full programme here: 11+ Learning Journey.

If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected]. Thank you for being part of our journey it’s been a privilege to support your family’s learning.

*If you need to reset your password, it will still work as usual. Please check your spam folder if the reset email doesn’t appear in your inbox.

Coding benefits for kids

Benefits of learning to code for kids
​Why is your child learning to code in primary school and why is coding an important skill for their future? We asked the experts at Bright Little Labs to explain why coding can and should be a part of a complete education for a modern child, and how to mix coding, stories, art and fun.

When talking about the importance of learning code in school, it’s often framed as a future-proofing skill: the UK has a shortage of programmers and the demand for programming skills will undoubtedly increase in the future, so a child should learn to code and become a coder to guarantee future employment. This is a rather unhelpful view – after all, we don't teach children how to structure a narrative and express themselves creatively because we assume they will all become novelists!

Far from being an exclusively technical and specialised discipline, coding can teach a large number of general life skills to all ages (you might consider dipping into a little Scratch, Python or HTML yourself, too!).

Coding teaches logic and creativity

As little as ten or fifteen years ago, the theory of left-brain or right-brain dominance suggested that the left side of the brain side was rational, logical and spatial, and the right side was creative, emotional and instinctual.

Today we recognise this is a popular psychology myth, but people still think that coders are logical and artists are creative. This isn’t necessarily true: coders need creativity to come up with clever ways to get a computer (a machine with no brain!) to appear to "think" and artists need a high level of technical competence and spatial reasoning to operate in a highly technical and mostly digital industry.

Designers who can code a website will have an edge over those who can’t, and the same goes for game programmers who can sculpt a 3D model or write a compelling narrative.

Multi-disciplined people are often known as “unicorns” in the tech industry because they’re so rare and sought after!

Coding teaches patience and resilience

Coders generally agree that no piece of code runs perfectly with no errors the first time. Coding, like a lot of things, isn’t about inspired genius so much as perseverance. This need for emotional resilience and patience means that writing code often isn’t very enjoyable, but it’s usually worth it for the amazing things you can achieve using programming languages.

Patience and the ability to recover from mistakes are important not only for learning career and life skills, but for dealing with the bumps we encounter in life, too. Sometimes things don’t go to plan, sometimes there are accidents nobody could predict, and coding can teach you not to throw your mouse across the room and “rage-quit” at the first hurdle.

Coding teaches prediction and empathy

The really interesting thing about algorithms is that you can’t make adjustments on the fly while they’re running. You can only try to think ahead for every need a user might have, or every possible interaction that might occur, and anticipate a solution. This means that you will have to test your program with real humans and learn that every “well, that wouldn’t happen” scenario can absolutely happen (and often does!).

By learning to code and to test that code and adjust to make it work, your child will learn to appreciate that everyone thinks differently, and that is okay; you can plan for it and make sure to accommodate every user’s needs to make a brilliant app, game, robot or website.

Online and offline digital skills learning

Whatever medium your child prefers, there are opportunities for them to learning about coding and practise using their developing skills. Here are some of TheSchoolRun's favourite coding resources:

Coding doesn't have to involve screens though! Bright Little Labs believes that spy adventures with fun characters or secret-agent-themed missions are a great way to put the UK coding curriculum into new contexts and learn to think like a coder. The Agent Asha Gift Pack helps children learn digital literacy and other digital skills in a screen-free way with an Agent Asha spy adventure book, a personalised invitation to the Children’s Spy Agency, and a spy starter pack full of STEM-related activities.