Pavel Malik, Assistant Head & Director of Digital Learning at Radnor House Sevenoaks (below), discusses the benefit of teaching coding skills from a young age

Learning coding offers many educational benefits. From helping to develop digital skills and building future career opportunities to teaching mathematics, computational thinking and problem-solving. Coding also links to different areas of the curriculum, particularly STEM subjects.

Setting the foundations for coding

Technology plays such an important role in our lives that we want to instil interest and understanding of technology from a young age. Creating a programme of study where Coding and Robotics start in Reception enables us to build interest. Furthermore, it develops IT skills at the same time we are introducing reading, writing and arithmetic. Our focus is on robotics, using block coding instructions in Year 1 and progressing to text-based coding in Python in Year 5 and above.

Developing digital thinking

All pupils in the Prep School receive one hour of computing per week, helping them to develop computational skills which transfer across different educational disciplines, including logic, writing and research. When our Prep School students enter our Secondary School, they are much more advanced at handling technology than many new entrants and often help new students get up to speed.

Closing the digital skills gap

Reports show that the global jobs market is suffering a shortage of digitally able workers, making skilled individuals highly desirable and necessary for progress and economic growth. By investing in skills from a young age and continuing this support throughout the school, we are equipping students for global workplace success and hope to inspire more under- represented groups to achieve careers in technology.”

Radnor House Sevenoaks has an Open Morning on Saturday 18th March 2023. Register interest at radnor-sevenoaks.org/opendays-tours

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