Our awards, and what each one took
Every award on this page was decided by somebody outside The Code Zone. Here is what each one is, who judged it and what earning it involved, so you can check any of it rather than take a row of logos on trust. The last one is not ours at all, and it is the one we are proudest of.
2nd in the UK, Club Hub UK Top 100
Club Hub UK is the national directory parents use to find children’s activities. Every year it publishes a Top 100 Children’s Activity Providers list, and in 2026 we placed 2nd.
Why it matters to you. Placings were scored by five independent judges, not decided by whoever could gather the most votes. Two of the five things they scored are safeguarding and inclusivity, which are the two a parent worries about and the two that never show up in an advert.
What earning it involved. A placing rests on all five criteria at once, so being strong in one area does not carry it. The finished list is published in full, which means nothing here depends on us being the ones to tell you about it.
Where “the UK’s #1 coding club” comes from
It is not a separate award, and it is worth showing the working. On the 2026 list we placed 2nd overall, and no coding club placed above us. That makes us the highest placed coding club on that list, which is the whole of what the phrase means.
It is a statement about the 2026 list and not a permanent title, and you can work it back yourself: the list names all one hundred providers and what each one does.
What the judges scored
- The benefits of the activity itself
- Safeguarding
- Inclusivity
- Community impact
- Business achievements
won the UK, then won the world
Global winner, Xero Beautiful Business Fund
This one is two wins, not one. We won the Upskilling For The Future category in the UK first. Winning the UK put us into the global round against the national winners from every other country the fund runs in, and we won that too.
How the two stages worked
- Stage one, the UK. We won the Upskilling For The Future category nationally.
- Stage two, the world. That put us up against the other countries’ winners in the same category. Xero’s page for it lists those winners by country and heads ours “Global winner: The Code Zone | UK”.
What the funding is for
Xero’s own words: “The funding will help them to recruit and train more mentors and open more clubs to reach more children.” So it is not a trophy. More mentors and more clubs is the whole of what it was awarded to do.
That film is the entry we submitted, not a piece Xero made about us. Both it and the quote above are on Xero’s winners page for the category.
Autism Inclusion Award, National Autistic Society
The National Autistic Society’s Autism Inclusion Award is an internationally recognised standard built on the Autism Education Trust’s frameworks.
What earning it involved. Organisations are assessed against set criteria and measured on outcomes for autistic children rather than on intentions, and holding it commits us to being reassessed. It is not a one-off certificate that sits on a wall.
Why it matters to you. In practice it is why every mentor has the training, rather than one person in the office having done a course. More than a third of our members are autistic or have ADHD, which is what their parents have told us.
How the sessions actually run
measured on outcomes
STEM.org certified
As of January 2024, The Code Zone has been STEM officially certified by STEM.org.
What it covers
Our award programme is STEM-certified, so the levels a child works through are checked against a standard rather than invented by us. Every mentor is STEM-certified and DBS-checked.
This is an accreditation rather than a prize, which makes it the least exciting item on this page and arguably the most useful one: it is the piece that applies to every single session.
One more, which is funding rather than a prize
We secured funding from Innovate UK through their Fast Start Competition. It belongs on this page because it was competitive and decided by other people, but it is a grant and not an award, so it gets a line rather than a section.
The one we are proudest of is not ours
In 2025 Matt, one of our longest attending members, was announced as a finalist in the concept category of the BAFTA Young Game Designers.
He had been coming for five years by then, working up through our levelling system, earning XP and certificates the whole way. That progression is the part worth telling.
This is Matt’s achievement, not ours. He had the idea, built the concept and entered it himself. What we did was run the club he came to every week for five years.
Read what we wrote at the time
“Inky Void”
An astronaut trapped on a moon, armed only with a paintbrush. That was the concept BAFTA shortlisted.
BAFTA Young Game Designers is a competition to get young people into the games industry, including the chance to meet the people already working in it.