Coding classes in Northumberland

Each day in the council's table has four entries, alternating safe and unsafe, like "21:50 until 04:15 (Wed)". The learner writes a parser that turns every entry into a proper start and end moment, working out the right date when a window runs past midnight. For September 2026 to August 2027 that gives 365 rows and 1,460 entries. The first check finds that 50 of them are printed twice, because a night window ends one row and begins the next. Removing those leaves 1,410 distinct windows that fit together perfectly: no gaps, no overlaps, and safe and unsafe always taking turns.

The clock-change rows are the heart of the lesson. The council labels them carefully, for example an unsafe period from 00:15 in summer time until 05:05 Greenwich Mean Time on 25 October 2026. A program that simply subtracts clock readings gets the length wrong by exactly an hour, in opposite directions in autumn and spring. The fix every professional uses is to convert each moment to universal time before doing arithmetic, and to convert back only for display. Python's zoneinfo module does this for the Europe/London time zone in a few lines.

The last question is the practical one. We looked for days with a safe window that covers at least four hours between 09:00 and 18:00, after taking 30 minutes off the end of the window as a cautious reading of the council's advice. That is true on 242 days of the 365, and the monthly count ranges from 18 to 22. The 30-minute margin alone removes 17 days, a small rule with a visible effect.

So a young person in Northumberland should learn to code in 2026 to catch the mistakes that only happen on rare days. The longer argument is in why teenagers should still learn to code in 2026.