How Code Club is run and our relationship with our funders

Yesterday Linda Sandvik resigned from the Code Club board. As a co-founder of Code Club and early contributor to the organisation we all owe Linda a big thank you and wish her the best of luck in her next endeavour.

As an independent, non-political organisation, we remain totally committed to Code Club’s core aim to give every child in the UK the chance to learn to code, which we will continue to push forward with the support of our amazing volunteers and supporters.

For more information on our company structure, how we operate and our funders, please see below.

Code Club Family

Code Club UK, Code Club Pro and Code Club World are all part of the same family and operate through Code Club World Limited (Company Number: 08140247). We have the umbrella aim of giving all children the opportunity to learn to code.

Corporate Governance

Our structure and funding

We are an independent body, a registered not-for-profit and a company limited by guarantee. This means we don’t earn profits for ourselves. Instead, all of the money earned by or donated to us is used in pursuing our objective: ‘to give every child in the UK the chance to learn to code.’

Our objectives are set out in our ‘Articles of Association’. These articles, to which all of our directors are bound, define how we run Code Club.

We are governed by our Board of Directors, who have been appointed to jointly govern the activities of Code Club. The Board is responsible for policy development, partnerships, for the conduct of our finances, and for monitoring our performance against agreed targets. We operate in a democratic way, and all of our ‘big’ decisions are made by board consensus. Our board meet monthly to discuss Code Club’s core activities, growth, partnerships and to make important decisions that require board approval. We have three directors:

Chris Mairs, CBE – Chief Scientist at Metaswitch Networks and a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (Chair and Director)
Lance Howarth – CEO of Raspberry Pi Foundation (Director)
Clare Sutcliffe – CEO of Code Club World (Director)

Our directors have a duty to work towards our objectives and always act in the best interests of Code Club. More specifically, this means our directors must act within their powers, and have a duty to promote the success of Code Club, to exercise independent judgment, to exercise reasonable care, skill and diligence, to avoid conflicts of interest, not to accept benefits from third parties and to declare any interest in a proposed transaction or arrangement. For a fuller explanation, please see the Companies Act here.

Our CEO, Clare Sutcliffe, is appointed by and is accountable to the Board. Her role is to provide day-to-day leadership of Code Club and its initiatives in line with the Board’s strategic direction.

Funders

Code Club receive funding from different organisations who support our core aims. However, we are an independent, non-political organisation. All of our views are our own and are neither directed nor constrained by our sponsors. Our sponsors do not influence how Code Club runs as an organisation and have no hand in its management.

We are funded through a number of channels, including:

• grants from The Centre for Social Action and Innovation, Nominet Trust and Google Rise
• corporate donations including from ARM, Canary Wharf Group, Google, Postcode Anywhere, Samsung and TalkTalk
• the Department for Education

In the future, we hope some of our funding will be self-generated through Code Club Pro.

We are not under any obligation to endorse any of the products or services of our corporate funders. Where we make recommendations, they are based on merit alone. To that end, Code Club produces unbranded, open-source materials in which children are never purposefully exposed to the names of any of our corporate partners.

Code Club continue to be grateful for the support we have been given from our partners and supporters – without them we couldn’t continue to offer free after school clubs, improve the quality of our materials or support our growing volunteer network.

Volunteers

We currently have around 2000 amazing volunteers who give their time to to run a Code Club on a regular basis. Many of these have also come on board to help train teachers through Code Club Pro. These people are crucial in helping us give children all over the UK the opportunity to learn how to code.

The majority of Code Club’s work is in supporting and growing this amazing community of people. The views of our volunteers are not our own and vice-versa.