TL;DR

Digital Xtra is building a Scotland-wide network of hubs teaching coding and AI in the community, changing tack after a decade of handing out annual grants. The charity has put roughly £1.1m into upwards of 200 grassroots projects over ten years, reaching upwards of 60,000 young people, but says access still depends too heavily on where a child happens to live. Four sites open first, with government backing.

From grants to premises

The shift is structural rather than cosmetic. Rather than funding projects one at a time, the new Code Xtra strategy anchors provision in fixed locations that then support clubs in the surrounding area. Phase one covers Muirhouse Library in north Edinburgh, Dalkeith Library in Midlothian, Creative Regeneration in Inverclyde and Elgin Library in Moray, with further sites due to be named later this year.

Each hub works on three fronts — running activities, training the adults who deliver them, and lending equipment out to nearby schools and community groups. That last function matters most for the places least able to buy kit themselves.

What is actually being taught

The hubs will stock Lego Education’s curriculum-aligned computing and AI kits, which introduce coding and machine learning at an age-appropriate level. Few if any other Scottish organisations are thought to have made that equipment publicly available yet, and it brings machine learning into what the charity covers, a first for the organisation. Raspberry Pi Foundation and Raising Robots provide ongoing training, working alongside commercial backers: Cirrus Logic, Skyscanner and Baillie Gifford among them.

Kraig Brown, the charity’s partnerships and development manager, put the case for informal settings plainly: without assessment hanging over them, young people can think creatively, and clubs reach children who disengage in a conventional classroom. On uneven provision he was blunter still, calling the current position unacceptable.

Looking forward

This is skills policy with a delivery mechanism attached, which distinguishes it from the announcements that usually carry the phrase “digital skills”. The parallel with the AI training schemes launched in Barnsley and the North West this week is hard to miss: three interventions in days, all place-based, all betting that geography is the binding constraint rather than curriculum. For Scottish employers facing a technical hiring squeeze, the payoff is a decade out — but the lending-library model is the part most likely to be copied south of the border first.