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Clare Sutcliffe, co-founder of the enormously successful Code Club and executive director at Raspberry Pi, has announced that she is to leave both organisations with today being her last day.
"After six incredible years at Code Club and the Raspberry Pi Foundation, I’ve made the difficult but exciting decision to search out new adventures and challenges," She wrote in a blog post.
Code Club, which was founded by Sutcliffe and Linda Sandvik in 2012, is a free after-school club for primary school-aged children to teach them Scratch, HTML & CSS, Python and a variety of other coding languages in a format that is fun and voluntary. The organisation now has over 10,000 clubs around the world and over 100,000 children attending weekly. "When I co-founded Code Club back in April 2012, I had no idea it would grow to the size and vibrancy it has today." Sutcliffe said "I’m incredibly proud".
Code Club became ‘a wholly owned subsidiary of the Raspberry Pi Foundation’ in November 2015 and though the brand and approach remained unchanged, the association with the microcomputer manufacturer enabled it to have a much wider net of influence than ever before.
She continued: "I’ve had the immense privilege of visiting some of these clubs to witness the impact our work has — there’s nothing like watching a Code Club in action to make my heart sing. Since Code Club merged with the Raspberry Pi Foundation, it has continued to go from strength to strength, and it’s a joy to see it thriving in its new home with an excellent team behind it."
For her efforts in inspiring a new generation of programmers, Clare was awarded with an MBE in 2015 and recognised with PCR’s Women of the Year Lifetime Achievement award in 2017.
The announcement that she was to leave was made on Twitter earlier this week
After six amazing years I’ve decided to move on from @CodeClub and @Raspberry_Pi to to find new challenges and adventures. it has been a wild ride, I've learnt so much and had a lot of fun on the way!
— Clare Sutcliffe MBE (@ClareSutcliffe) March 13, 2018
Clare currently has no immediate plans. PCR has reached out for comment.
