Guides for parents

Both give children the same hands-on STEM, but they solve different problems. An after-school club is a weekly term-time habit at your child's own school. A holiday club fills a school holiday with longer, deeper sessions and covers childcare across the working day. The two also combine well, so it is not really either-or.

For most children, yes. A good coding club builds problem-solving, resilience and confidence, not just technical skill, and the hands-on, social setting keeps children engaged in a way that apps at home rarely match. The value is in the habits of mind as much as the code.

Trust comes down to checkable facts, not glossy photos: enhanced DBS checks for staff, paediatric first aid on site, a written safeguarding policy with a named lead, a ratio the club can state confidently, clear drop-off and collection rules, and honesty about Ofsted registration. A good club answers all of this happily.

It can be, with the right version and the right framing. Minecraft Education is a school-oriented edition built around structured challenges, coding tools and teamwork, and it rewards planning and creativity. The game is not automatically educational on its own, though: what matters is how it is used, and screen time still needs to stay limited.

Tax-Free Childcare tops up what you pay into a government childcare account: for every £8 you add, the government adds £2, spendable with registered childcare providers including holiday clubs. The catch: it only works where the venue is Ofsted registered and the provider has signed up to the scheme, so always check the specific venue before you book.

Children can start coding from around age 5 using visual, block-based tools, then move to typed code around 9 to 11. There's no single right age. What matters is matching the tools to your child's stage so it stays playful, hands-on and fun.

Children can start robotics from around age 5 with screen-free floor robots and simple build kits, move on to motorised builds like LEGO WeDo from about 6 or 7, and handle sensors and more serious programmable kits from around 9 or 10. As with coding, readiness matters more than the birthday.

At a good STEM club children build, code, experiment and solve problems with their hands, not just sit at a screen. At Tech Tigers every session runs four zones at once, from coding on iPads to robots, big builds and engineering puzzles, with nine rotating kits so no two sessions are the same.