Every coding school says roughly the same six things. Expert instructors, small classes, project-based learning, personalized attention, industry-relevant skills, a certificate at the end. None of that distinguishes anything, because none of it is falsifiable.
This is the list of questions that actually separate schools, including the ones that are awkward for us to answer. We run one of these, so read this with that in mind. We have tried to write the page we would have wanted before spending money on something similar.
What actually makes one coding school better than another?
Two things carry most of the difference: who is doing the teaching, and whether anyone notices when your child stops understanding. Everything else in the marketing is either downstream of those or decoration.
That is not a slogan. The largest analysis of tutoring we could find, a 2020 meta-analysis of preK-12 tutoring experiments by Nickow, Oreopoulos and Quan, reports an overall pooled effect of 0.37 standard deviations, and finds that "effects are stronger, on average, for teacher and paraprofessional tutoring programs than for nonprofessional and parent tutoring."
Read that second part again, because it is the buying advice. The gains come from trained people, not from enthusiastic ones. A school staffed by university students who are good at coding is not the same product as one staffed by people who have been taught how to teach, even when the marketing photograph looks identical.
Who is teaching, and is it the same person every week?
Ask both parts, because schools answer the first one happily and the second one vaguely. A rotating pool of tutors means nobody accumulates any knowledge of your child, and the thing you are paying for is precisely that accumulated knowledge.
The tell is in how the answer is phrased. "All our instructors are qualified" answers a different question than the one you asked. What you want is a name, and confirmation that the name will be the same in March.
There is a second question hiding behind it: what happens when that person is unavailable? Every school has illness and holidays. A good answer describes a specific arrangement. A bad one has clearly never been considered.
How many children are in the class?
Ask for the number, not the adjective. "Small groups" covers everything from three to fifteen, and the research suggests the difference between eight and ten is not worth paying for while the difference between fifteen and one is.
The best evidence on class size is Project STAR, the Tennessee experiment from the late 1980s. As Brookings summarizes it, children randomly assigned to small classes averaging 15 pupils "outperformed their classmates...by about 0.22 standard deviations after four years", worth "about 3 additional months of schooling". That is a real effect, and it came from cutting class size by "7 students, or 32 percent".
The caveat matters more than the headline for a parent comparing two schools. The same piece calculates that changing class size by a single student produces improvements of "1 to 2 point" on standardized tests, which it calls "too small to be noticeable". So a school advertising groups of six against another advertising eight is selling you a distinction the evidence does not support.
Brookings is also blunt that class size reduction is expensive relative to what it buys, noting one analysis found it "the least cost effective" intervention studied. Which is the honest frame: pay attention to the shape of the difference, not the decimal. One-to-one is a different product. Six versus eight is marketing.
What will my child have built after two months?
Ask for specifics and be suspicious of a syllabus. A list of topics covered tells you what was said in the room. A list of finished projects tells you what your child can actually do.
The reason this question works is that it is hard to answer vaguely. A school that runs genuine project work will name things: a game where you dodge falling objects, a quiz that keeps score, a robot that stops before a wall. A school that mostly delivers lessons will describe concepts instead, because there is nothing to point at.
For reference, both of our tracks are 32 weeks, 64 live classes and 32 projects, with two project options every week so the mentor can match the child. Whatever school you are looking at, that is the shape of the answer you want: a number you can check, not a promise.
What happens when they get stuck between classes?
Ask it exactly like that, because it is the question schools have least often thought about. Most of a child's frustration happens on the four days when nobody is teaching, and a school with no answer here is selling you two hours a week rather than a learning relationship.
Good answers vary. Some schools have a channel where a mentor replies. Some record every session so a half-remembered explanation is recoverable. Some set practice that is deliberately easy enough to succeed alone. Any of those is fine. "They can ask in the next class" means your child will be stuck for four days, and a stuck child usually just stops opening the laptop.
Can you watch a lesson?
The answer to this tells you more than the answer itself. A school confident in what happens in the room will say yes without hesitating, and one that hedges is telling you something it did not mean to.
You do not need to sit through every class, and honestly you should not, because a watched child performs rather than learns. But being able to watch one, at the start, is the only way to replace a brochure with evidence. Almost everything else you are told is unverifiable until months of fees have gone.
Take the trial, and watch that. Twenty minutes of seeing your own child work with the actual person who would teach them tells you more than every review you will read, including this page.
What should it cost?
Anywhere from free to several hundred a month, and price tracks format far more than quality. Before paying anything, be clear that free options exist and are good: Scratch, Code.org and Code Club are all genuinely free, and a child with no budget should start there this week rather than waiting.
For what it is worth, ours are $40 a month for small group classes and $99 a month for one-to-one, both with two live classes a week. At $99 that works out under $13 per one-to-one class, and we should be straight about why: we are cheaper because of where we teach from, not because the classes are shorter or the mentors are junior.
The number to compare is not the monthly fee, it is the cost per hour of attention your child actually receives. A cheap group class where your child says nothing for eight weeks is not cheap. Our guide to the best coding apps and websites for kids covers where the free tools stop being enough, and whether online coding classes are worth it works through the same decision from the other direction.
What is the one question most parents forget to ask?
What happens if my child hates it. Every school has an answer for the child who thrives, and the useful information is in what happens to the one who does not.
Ask about the refund window and whether it is real. Ask whether anyone would tell you if your child were disengaged, or whether the invoices would simply continue. Ask what they would do about it. A school that has thought about this has thought about children rather than enrollments.
We will give you our own number here with the qualification attached, because the number on its own would be misleading. More than 85% of the children who take a free trial with us go on to enroll. A trial is a self-selecting moment though, and a parent who books one is already interested, so that figure flatters us before a class even starts. What it shows is narrower and more useful: when parents watch a lesson happen, they rarely walk away. Which is really an argument for taking a trial somewhere, not necessarily here.
If you want to see ours, a free trial class is one live session with a mentor, with no card details and no commitment. Come with the questions above. If we answer them badly, you will have learned something useful for the next school on your list.
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