Impact Report 2025/26: CEO Reflections on a Year of Learning and Evolution

Reflecting on the past academic year, I am filled with pride in what our community of students, educators, and industry partners has achieved together. Apps for Good has continued to make significant progress, giving young people the skills, confidence, and motivation to shape their futures through technology. This year alone, our free computing courses reached 26,746 young people across 622 schools in the UK. We’ve also seen our global impact grow, with our delivery partner CDI Portugal bringing our courses to 188 schools and 3,816 students, and many other schools around the world downloading our free education content.

2025/26 has been a pivotal year of learning, strengthening the user experience for our educators, and deepening our impact:

• Celebrating 15 years of impact: We proudly marked 15 years of sparking creativity and social action by releasing 15 Stories for 15 Years. It was an honour to see our team's hard work recognised nationally as Apps for Good won SheCanCode’s Not-for-Profts in STEM Education Award and were shortlisted for the Edufuturists Awards.
• Demystifying tech careers: We brought industry directly into classrooms by expanding our Industry Engagement sessions, culminating in 252 student team entries to our 2026 Showcase receiving feedback from a community of 179 Industry Volunteers. We also delivered sessions at high-impact events like the Manchester MEGA, sparking curiosity among 500 female students.
• Championing future-ready skills: To help schools navigate an AI-shaped world safely and responsibly, we developed our brand new AI for Good 2.0 course and our accompanying Teacher's Guide, just in time for the 2026/27 academic year. I had the privilege of sharing our insights through a featured session at Bett 2026 and across key education podcasts like EdTransformed and Edufuturists, pictured above!
• Revamping the educator experience: To ensure teachers feel confident and supported at every stage of our new course, we built a new, integrated platform connecting course delivery, volunteer management, and real-time impact data in one place. The new platform provides an interactive, lesson-by-lesson online experience for educators with course materials, Industry Engagement requests and Showcase entry seamlessly embedded. Plus, with quick end-of-lesson feedback and our own internal admin dashboard, we can better understand classroom contexts and provide tailored support when and where educators need it most.

While we celebrate these successes, 2025/26 was equally a year of listening, learning, and adapting.

As AI rapidly reshapes how we live and work, we see a growing need to provide young people with future-ready skills, combining digital literacy with essential life skills like critical thinking, teamwork, and problem-solving. While 56% of young people want hands-on AI projects, only 16% of teachers currently feel confident teaching it. At the same time, the persistent challenge of student disengagement and the NEET crisis highlights the urgency of early intervention. Research shows that young people with high levels of employer engagement before age 16 have 80% lower odds of becoming NEET.

These insights reinforce why our work matters: when young people connect learning to real-world context and pitch their ideas to positive role models, they transform from passive consumers into confident creators. Our new AI for Good 2.0 course is designed specifically to bridge this gap, combining practical AI and computing skills with essential human capabilities like ethics and critical thinking, all backed by embedded industry feedback. But we know this is an ongoing journey. As AI adoption accelerates and the education landscape continues to evolve, we must evolve too. That is why we are constantly learning how to better track and understand this transformation, strengthening our feedback mechanisms and school relationships this year to build the foundation for robust, long-term evaluation efforts.

As we step into 2026/27, we are placing ethical AI literacy, real-world relevance, and student agency front and centre.

We are thrilled to launch AI for Good 2.0 alongside our brand-new platform, both designed to directly respond to what our teachers and young people tell us they need most. As we enter this new academic year, we are genuinely excited to see how these developments land in classrooms, and whether they spark the depth of change and impact we are striving for. It’s another year of learning for us as an organisation, and we can’t wait to see what our students and teachers create next.

Without the support of our partners there would be no impact. We simply would not be able to create and offer our courses free of charge to schools and would not be able to provide the much needed industry engagement opportunities valued by both teachers and students. This year has been an especially challenging funding landscape, and we welcome conversations with partners - past, present and future to explore how we can continue giving young people the skills, confidence, and motivation to shape their futures through technology. If you’d like to invest in our next generation of tech innovators, we’d love to hear from you at partnerships@appsforgood.org.