King’s Birthday Honours 2025: Raspberry Pi Foundation CEO Philip Colligan ‘humbled’ by CBE - and says much work is still to be done
The chief executive officer of the Raspberry Pi Foundation has spoken of the importance of young people learning to code in an age of AI after he was made a CBE for services to engineering and technology for societal impact.
Philip Colligan, from Cambridge, heads up the charity that deploys profits from the Raspberry Pi computer business along with philanthropic donations to further its aim of democratising computing for young people around the world.
It trains teachers and provides resources for schools and engages young people with online resources and apps, clubs, competitions and partnerships with youth organisations.
Philip said he was shocked when news of the honour arrived in the post.
“You come down the stairs one Saturday morning and it looks like a classic tax letter and of course it was not. It was totally out of the blue,” he told the Cambridge Independent. “It’s very humbling. It means a huge amount. It’s not something I ever expected or anticipated.
“It feels like an important recognition, not just for me it’s important to say, but for what we’ve achieved at Raspberry Pi over this past 10 years that I’ve been leading it.
“We are a non-profit focused on democratising computing for all young people.
“I wasn’t one of the founding team - I joined 10 years ago this week. We knew it had a lot of potential then.
“We’ve built a technology business that is on the London Stock Exchange and valued at over £1bn. The value of that comes to the non-profit, the charity, which means we can use the value created by the technology business to advance our education goals.
“We’ve supported hundreds of thousands of teachers and tens of millions of students over that decade, all over the world.
“We are one of the most significant educational charities in the world focused on computing education and digital skills. That’s a team effort. We have an amazing team and an amazing group of partners and together we’ve been able to build something pretty good.”
Among the ways the foundation helps to engage young people from all backgrounds in coding and computer science is by helping to promote and provide resources for Code Clubs, a global movement of coding clubs.
“We merged with Code Clubs just a few months after I joined. There must be something like 9,000 of them all over the world now,” said Philip.
“In the first 10 years of Code Club, two million took part - attending for a decent amount of time, not just one session.
“Now it’s a global movement, growing faster in Africa than anywhere else. We have partnerships in Kenya, South Africa and lots of other countries.
“If you volunteer for Code Club, it will be the best hour of your week. It’s the most amazing thing to see kids developing their confidence and their ability to create things with technology.
“Now, in an age of AI, I think it’s more important than ever.”
Today, AI-powered platforms like ChatGPT can create code for us through prompting, but Philip believes it would be a mistake to think coding skills are no longer as important.
“These systems are incredible. They can generate code and they can make programming easier and more accessible but we still need humans who can control them,” he said.
“We’ve got to give them prompts. We’ve got to think about what problems we want to use these technologies to solve. There’s no guarantee that what they produce is accurate.
“Perhaps most importantly, AI systems don’t have any sense of ethics.
“If we want technology to be a force for good, we need a diverse group of students who have the skills to use that technology to lead to better outcomes for all of us.”
Raspberry Pi Foundation published a paper earlier this month titled ‘Why kids still need to learn to code in the age of AI, calling for urgent action to prepare young people for the age of AI after industry figures showed 30 per cent of code is now being written by AI systems.
“I think there’s a real danger in the idea that AI is going to do the coding for us,” said Philip. “We’re trying to counter that. AI is going to open up new opportunities for computation to solve all sorts of problems - in agriculture, healthcare, the environment. There are loads of opportunities. We want all young people, particularly kids who come from backgrounds that are underrepresented in tech, to be able to take advantage of those.
“But also it matters to all of us who is running the tech businesses that are changing the world and I think we will all benefit if that’s as diverse a group as possible.”
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has achieved a great deal since it was founded in 2008 by David Braben, Jack Lang, Pete Lomas, Rob Mullins, Alan Mycroft and Eben Upton, with a mission of making computing accessible to all.
And the commercial business, floated on the London Stock Exchange last year, continues to fire on all cylinders. The low-cost Pi became the biggest-selling British computer in 2015, overtaking the ZX Spectrum. As of March 2025, some 68 million of the single board computers have been sold.
But the foundation still has much work to do, says Philip.
“We are a global organisation. We have teams now in India, the US, Kenya, South Africa, Europe and the UK. We have achieved a lot. But I think we are a long way from being able to say all young people in all schools are able to be offered a computer science education,” he says.
“I do think we need to reimagine computer science in a world of AI and a lot of that is how we can bring it into science, maths and the arts, languages and the humanities.
“It’s no longer just for the computer scientists and the software engineers. That’s a lot of the work we’re doing and particularly we’re trying to push on in those low and middle-income countries and rural communities where it is more challenging to offer computer science as a subject.
“It’s partly about access to devices, it’s partly about the internet, but mostly it’s about how we support and train teachers. That’s a lot of the work we’re doing now.
“Half of what the foundation spends every year comes from philanthropy and donations. We take commercial profit - the value we’ve created through the commercial company - and we combine that with resources from individuals, companies and foundations, which is what allows us to have such a big global footprint.”
And you sense that footprint is only set to grow further in the coming years.
