UK franchise

Open a Robocode centre.

Join the UK's robotics and coding school for 6 to 17 year olds. Four centres are open, 400 Robocoders come every week, and most of the country is still unclaimed.

Apply now See the process

From £155,750 to open, plus a £30,000 working capital reserve that stays in your account.

The arcade and social area at the Robocode Solihull centre, with a full-wall graffiti mural Robocode Solihull
4centres open
400+Robocoders every week
22,000+Robocoders reached

Why Robocode

A programme that already runs every week

Fitting out a room takes a fortnight. What takes years is nineteen courses that hold a child's attention, an assessment ladder that leads somewhere, accreditation from a chartered institute, and enough trained Mentors to deliver it on a wet Tuesday in February. All of that exists.

01 · Curriculum

Nineteen courses, already written

Robotics, game development, AI, cyber security, 3D printing and mechanical engineering, and GCSE Computer Science, each with its own lesson plans, resources, assessments and place on the progression ladder. You will not write a single lesson.

02 · Qualifications

BCS and GCSE qualifications

BCS Level 1 and Level 2, AQA GCSE Computer Science and WJEC GCSE Electronics, sat through a JCQ-registered exam centre. Getting accredited took us the best part of two years. You inherit it on day one.

03 · People

Mentors, trained and certified

Four weeks of Mentor Certification for you and your first hires, covering systems, teaching, management and sales, with six assessments you have to pass. You still have to find good people. We will tell you whether you have.

Investment

What it costs to open

Three centre sizes. The difference between them is teaching rooms, and teaching rooms set your ceiling. Each room seats ten children a class and runs eighteen classes a week, which is 180 active Robocoders per room.

Working capital sits alongside, not inside, these figures. A separate £30,000 reserve is held in your own business account as an operating buffer until the centre is trading. You are not paying it to anyone.

Revenue figures are modelled at 60% of room capacity and are illustrative. They are not a forecast, a promise or a guarantee of financial performance. Your results depend on your territory, your team and how you run the centre.

Every number, in one place

How a centre fills

The Free Tech Assessment

Almost nobody enrols a child from an advert. They enrol after that child has sat in the room and built something. So we do not run trial lessons. We run a Free Tech Assessment: forty-five minutes, one to one, where a Mentor works out what the child can already do and shows the parent exactly where they would start.

It converts because it is useful whether or not they join. A parent who walks away still leaves knowing more about their child than they did an hour earlier. It is the same script in every centre, it is measured, and it is what your Mentors are trained on in week two.

For your launch you do not have to fill it yourself. Robocode runs the advertising and delivers the first 200 qualified leads into it.

What the £15,000 launch fee actually buys

  • A crew spends a day in your centre once the fit-out is finished. You come away with one brand film, five cuts for social and thirty photographs. They are yours outright, not licensed back to you.

  • HQ runs the advertising for the first 60 to 90 days. Meta and Google, targeted to your postcode districts. You do not write the copy, set the budget or sit watching a dashboard.

  • The number we commit to is 200 qualified leads. If ninety days pass and the campaign has not produced them, it keeps running and we keep paying for it.

  • Someone from HQ is in the building when you open. Sitting in on the first assessments and the first conversion conversations. Not observing. Doing them alongside you.

This is work we do, not a budget we transfer into your account.

The process

Five steps to open

Six to nine months from first enquiry to opening day.

You get in touch

The form asks real questions, because a serious answer takes a serious brief. We reply with the full prospectus.

We talk properly

Thirty minutes on your territory, your background and what you actually want from this. We will tell you if it is not a fit.

Due diligence, both ways

The full financial model, the operations manual and the agreement. You get at least fourteen days with the agreement before anything is signed, per the British Franchise Association Code of Ethics.

Signing and training

Licence signed, territory locked, four-week Mentor Certification scheduled, and the search for your site begins.

Fit-out and launch

We specify the build room by room. The launch campaign starts before you open, and your first 200 leads arrive into the pipeline.

The process in detail

Territories

Where you could open

Robocode runs its own centres in Solihull and Liverpool. Newham and Leicester are run by franchise partners. That leaves most of the country. A territory is a set of postcode districts covering roughly 100,000 to 200,000 residents, and it is yours exclusively for as long as you meet the agreement.

See which cities are open

Outside the UK? Licensing and international franchising are handled at partners.robocode.uk.

FAQs

Good questions

What does it actually cost to open?
A Compact centre opens for £155,750, a Standard for £234,950 and a Full centre for £250,900. Each figure covers the licence, training, marketing launch, opening stock and the full fit-out including a 10% contingency. A separate £30,000 working capital reserve stays in your account. Most franchisees finance part of the fit-out through asset finance or commercial lending.
Do I need to be technical?
No, and most franchisees are not. You need to be able to run a business, recruit well and be present in your community. The teaching is done by certified Mentors, and the curriculum is written. If you cannot tell a Raspberry Pi from a Rubik's cube on day one, that is fine.
What do I pay on an ongoing basis?
A 10% royalty and a 2% marketing fund contribution, both on gross revenue, plus £400 a month per location for the LMS and platform. There is nothing else. Robotics kits are bought from Robocode at £70 to £90 a unit.
How big is a territory and is it exclusive?
A territory is a defined set of postcode districts, typically covering 100,000 to 200,000 residents, and up to around 250,000 in the handful of areas that do not divide cleanly, mapped on Royal Mail and Ordnance Survey boundaries. It is exclusive for the term, so we will not open another Robocode there and we will not licence anyone else to. That exclusivity is conditional on meeting the performance standards in the agreement.
How long until it breaks even?
Two different things are worth separating. Covering your monthly costs happens around month eight to eleven on our model. Getting back what you put in to open takes until the second or third year. The agreement sets a minimum of 200 active Robocoders by month 12. A strong launch and a good site pull both forward, a slow start pushes them back, and we would rather show you the whole model than quote you one number.
Where does the revenue come from?
Roughly 70% from weekly course subscriptions, 22% from holiday camps and 8% from exams. On top of that sit schools work, SEND and alternative provision referrals, competition teams and kit sales. HAF funding from your local authority pays for camp places for eligible children, which fills sessions that would otherwise go unsold.
Can I open more than one?
Yes. The multi-centre licence is £80,000 and covers your first three locations, with additional locations at £20,000 each. Several franchisees start with one and take an adjacent territory once they are established.
I am outside the UK.
International franchising and licensing are handled separately at partners.robocode.uk. Licensing runs on annual tiers rather than a franchise fee, and terms are set per market.

Apply now

Tell us about you

This form is longer than most. That is deliberate. A six-figure decision deserves a real answer rather than a brochure, and we cannot give you one without knowing your city, your timeline and what you are working with.

What happens next

The prospectus, immediately

Emailed the moment you submit. Every number, the full model and the room specifications.

Configurator access

A private link in the same email that opens the Build and Numbers tools. No password to remember.

A reply within 48 hours

From a person, with times for a thirty minute call. We will tell you straight away if your city is taken.

Your enquiry

Fields marked with a dot are required.

If you are not sure yet, tell us the region.

We reply within 48 hours. Your details are not shared with anyone outside Robocode UK.