It is open day, and the Grimsby Institute is full of prospective students. The college has been preparing to welcome them for months. Classrooms are spotless, staff are on hand to answer any questions and the walls are adorned with work created by fashion, photography and visual arts students. Throughout the college, there is a buzz of excitement in the air.

These are scenes you could usually expect to find at the Grimsby Institute at this time of year. But this year is different. For the first time since the college opened in 1944, there will not be an open day for prospective students, as a result of the lockdown restrictions imposed by the government.

Yet, school leavers are still preparing to move on from secondary school and are still considering their next steps. This situation presented us with a dilemma: how could we, as a college, reach out to our next intake of school leavers without interacting with them physically? Moreover, how could we help them to get ready to start further education when most of them would not have set foot in a formal learning environment for five months, come September?

There was no simple solution. But, by thinking creatively and using the technology at our disposal, we have come up with a plan to engage with school leavers and to help prepare them for learning at college. We have focused our plan on three key areas.

1. Virtual open days

Open days are crucial. They help us to attract as wide a group of learners as possible, and also offer school leavers a vital taste of what it will be like to attend college.

Knowing just how important these days are made us determined to try to replicate our open days online this year. Those who have expressed an interest in studying with us will be invited to visit the college electronically when the virtual open day goes live.

At the time of writing, there are still some mechanics to figure out, but we are currently building the landing page that will serve as the hub for our welcome content, directing visitors towards a range of department-specific pages and offering a flavour of what they can expect from the college.

Whether students are interested in studying game design or business management, they will have the chance - virtually - to meet heads of department and quiz them on course content, and hopefully they will end the day with a good understanding of what the Grimsby Institute can offer in their subjects.

This year, school leavers will not have sat the final exams they had long been preparing for, or had the traditional leavers’ events to mark the end of their time at secondary school. In the absence of these formative experiences, we believe it is particularly important that this cohort has the chance to form an emotional connection with the college life that awaits them.

We hope that attending a virtual open day will provide them with this, along with an opportunity to find out more about the academic side of things.

2. Taking community projects online

Colleges often play an important role in the local community that goes beyond providing further education. In a normal year, the Grimsby Institute will run multiple outreach programmes that aim to engage with people in our nearby communities. Crucially, running these inclusive programmes also allows us to share our college ethos with future learners.

One example of such a programme is our Warrior Women community choir. Although we only started this project earlier this year - as a means of bringing women in the community together with the help of one of our music teachers - we’ve already seen it foster a real sense of togetherness.

As well as allowing us to make a small contribution to the lives of those around us, the choir has given local people the opportunity to come and see the college for themselves and to get a feel for what we do. This, in turn, has given us the chance to spread our message about the importance of creativity, teamwork and personal development throughout the local area, engaging prospective learners along the way.

When lockdown measures were introduced, it became even more important to foster a sense of community spirit. As such, we decided to continue running our community sessions online. Not only does this allow us to continue to demonstrate our values and ethos to potential learners, it also showcases our creative use of technology to them.

As well as teacher-led events, we’re making sure that our student-creations community events are available online, too. This year, for instance, our digital and creative industries’ annual photography exhibition is going virtual. The event will be available to access through our website and also shared across our social media channels.

We are hugely proud of what our students produce year on year, and it’s so important that we give their work the attention it deserves. Not only is this key to honing our learners’ abilities and rewarding their hard work, it also allows us to demonstrate the sort of creative challenges that await incoming students.

Although it may seem indirect, persevering with such community-focused projects in spite of the current situation represents a genuine opportunity to engage and communicate with a wide audience that includes prospective students.

3. Early access to online resources

Even in a normal year, we always have to allow a certain amount of time for new students to adapt to college life. Acclimatising to the new styles of learning and new course content is a large part of this.

However, during lockdown, colleges have the opportunity to fast-track this process by giving students a head start over the summer break. We are hoping to provide incoming students with access to the college’s virtual resources, from online learning environments to course-specific software, allowing us to claw back some of the time that would otherwise have been lost.

For example, in the past, it has always been tricky for new learners to get the hang of our virtual learning environment. We are lucky enough to use Canvas - an intuitive cloud-based platform. It works brilliantly, but no matter how tech savvy, a new cohort always takes time to get to grips with it.

For this reason, we’re investigating a scheme that will allow incoming students to explore Canvas for themselves over the summer. We’re hoping to establish a system whereby anyone who has expressed an interest in studying with us will be given early access to our online induction course: Student Level Up. This will give them a good understanding of Canvas - including where to find content and how to submit assignments - as well as a rudimentary knowledge of Office 365 and some of its main features.

Again, this may not seem like a radical preparatory regime, but it might just help us to reclaim some of the time lost to this unpredictable crisis.

This year’s school leavers are in a precarious position, caught as they are between cancelled exams, replacement work and extended summer holidays. This makes them a tricky “target market” for colleges.

But with the right combination of technology and a human touch, colleges can provide support for their next cohort of learners, making the transition from secondary school as smooth as possible in these unprecedented times.

Deb Millar is director of digital learning technologies at the Grimsby Institute

This article originally appeared in the 12 June 2020 issue under the headline “Getting lockdown school leavers ready for college”