Playbook, private school
Group visits, where the visitors are other people's pupils
These enquiries are not families. They come from a head of year at a feeder prep school with a coach and twenty children, from somebody bringing several relocating families arriving in the same month, or from an association wanting a tour. Each is arranged with a person, and one of them involves children who belong to another school.
Why this is not the general answer
The handling pattern for group bookings holds across every trade. What follows is the part that does not.
- The visitors are pupils of a different school, so the arrangement involves ratios, a risk assessment and a named member of staff at each end, none of which is a matter of finding a free morning.
- A group of children has to be fitted around the teaching timetable and around lunch, which makes the workable dates far narrower than an open morning and decided by the school rather than by the group.
- The person enquiring is a member of staff somewhere else rather than a parent, so what they need is a contact and a process, not a description of the facilities.
- Relocating families arriving together are a group for scheduling only: each family still registers separately and sits the entrance assessment separately, and a group tour shortens nobody's admissions route.
How it arrives
- we would like to bring our year 6 to visit
- can you host a group tour for relocating families
- how many children can you take on a visit
- do you come and give talks to parents at our school
- can our group have lunch at the school
- who arranges a visit for a group
What has to be indexed for this to work
| Who arranges group visits, and how to reach them | A named role and an address, kept distinct from the general admissions enquiry. Group requests sent down the family enquiry route are the ones that sit unanswered longest. |
|---|---|
| What the school asks of a visiting group | Numbers, ages, ratios, the supervision and consent position, and what you provide on the day. Publish it and a visiting teacher can prepare before the first reply rather than after the third. |
| When groups are hosted | The parts of the week that work around the timetable, and any period you do not host at all, such as examination weeks. This is the constraint the enquirer has no way of guessing. |
| What a group visit is not | Whether it forms any part of admissions for a child in the party, and whether it replaces a family visit. State it, because a prep school parent will ask their own head whether the trip counted. |
The reply
Group visits are arranged directly with the school rather than booked online, because they have to be fitted around the teaching timetable and there are things we need from you in advance, including numbers, ages and your own supervision arrangements [1]. The contact for group visits is on our admissions page [2]. A visit is a look round rather than any part of admissions, so each family still registers and is assessed in the ordinary way [3]. Tell me your name, an email, roughly how many children and which year group, and it goes to the right person.
It says arranged rather than booked in the opening clause, because the enquirer is looking for a form. Listing what the school needs lets a visiting teacher reply usefully the first time instead of the third. And it closes the assumption that a group trip advances an application, which the prep school head will be asked about.
Where it stops
The trigger. Any group enquiry at all, since numbers, dates and supervision are agreed by a person, and anything that involves children from another school coming on site.
Group visits are set up by a person here rather than from a form. Leave me your name, an email, the number of children and the year group, and the school will come back to you with dates.
It stops answering before it guesses, says who will pick it up, and asks for the one thing that makes a reply possible. Nothing about it reads as a dead end.
Never say this here
Out of bounds
- Never offer a date to a group, because the timetable and the staff cover decide it and neither is visible from here.
- Never state a maximum group size, since it varies with the age of the children and with what they would be doing.
- Never suggest a group visit helps a child's application, which is untrue and will be repeated to a room full of parents.
- Never discuss any named child in a visiting party, including whether that child has registered.
Questions
- Are group enquiries frequent enough to write for?
- They are rare and expensive to lose. One feeder school visit represents a whole year group of families, and it is usually lost to a slow reply to an enquiry that landed in the wrong inbox.
- Can it collect the numbers we need up front?
- It asks for a name, an email and a message, and it can tell the enquirer what to put in the message. That is not a form, but it turns a two line enquiry into one that already carries the numbers and the year group.
- Should it mention lunch?
- Only what is published. Feeding a party is a real cost and a real logistics question, and getting it wrong means somebody arrives with twenty hungry children and an expectation the kitchen never had.
Keep reading
- Everything for a private schoolAdmissions timelines, fees, bursaries and uniform lists are safe ground for a school assistant. Anything about a named pupil or applicant is not.
- Handling group bookings in generalNearly always a handover, and an expensive one to fumble. Collect the date, the numbers and the requirements before it reaches a person.
- Two payments before a child has attended a single dayOne is paid to process an application and does not come back. The other is held against the final term. Families meet both in a fortnight.
- The question that needs a bursar rather than a fee scheduleA per family figure turns on year groups, boarding, the coach and a means tested award. The bursar builds it from evidence, not arithmetic.
- Evenings, weekends and the message that cannot wait until morningBoarding duty, the staff member on late cover and an empty office are three different evenings. A welfare message goes to a person at once.
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