Children's Mental Health Week 2026
Want to know how our clubs can benefit our member's mental health? Keep reading to find out more...
This week is Children’s Mental Health Week and 2026’s theme is “This is My Place” which is promoting the value of belonging in the mental health of children and young people! We wanted to talk about how our clubs help to provide a place that young people can see as an inclusive and nurturing environment!
Providing Community
To start with we like to believe that our clubs provide a community for our members where they get to make connections and grow friendships between each other!
Being in small groups of like-minded people makes it nice and easy to feel like you belong, with everyone having the time and space to share things like the types of games they’re into or other interests our members may have!
A Safe Online Space
Another way we do this is by providing a safe place to talk about anything that may be going on in our member’s lives, providing a kind and interested ear to all manner of things.
Be they achievements or just needing to decompress after a long hard day, our mentors are ready and willing to listen and provide conversation!
Prioritising Fun
Overall we feel that our members work best when they are comfortable and having fun in the sessions.
If you feel the same way too, why not sign up for a free taster session today?
About The Code Zone
We run coding clubs for children aged 6 to 16. Live online clubs are open to children anywhere in the UK, and our in-person clubs run across Essex, Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Suffolk. Over 1,000 children are enrolled.
A live club is one hour a week, in a group of no more than six, with the same DBS-checked, STEM-certified mentor.
Children build their own games rather than working through a set course, and levels move down as readily as up so the work always fits. More than a third of our members are autistic or have ADHD, based on what parents tell us when they join.
Most children start in Scratch or MakeCode and move to Python and TypeScript when they are ready. Mentors write a note on every child after every session, so we know when somebody is ready to move up or would rather stay put. Nothing is forced.
In 2025 we received the Autism Inclusion Award from the National Autistic Society, and in 2026 we were ranked second in the UK in Club Hub UK’s Top 100 Children’s Activity Providers, scored by five independent judges on safeguarding, inclusivity and community impact. Every mentor is DBS-checked and STEM-certified.
More like this
The blog is in two halves. Guides are the evergreen explainers written by the mentors who teach the clubs, covering the questions parents actually ask: what comes after Scratch, how to support a coding-mad child when you cannot code yourself, and what works for autistic and ADHD children.
Club news is the other half, and it is where posts like this one live: game jams, Minecraft builds and weekly roundups, written up by whoever ran the session. Neither is marketing. If you want to know what an hour actually looks like before you book anything, club news is the more honest read of the two.
The first session is a free taster and we do not ask for card details. Book a free taster session, see what it costs, or read about support for neurodivergent children.
