Ah, open day. Marching bands, freshly cut grass, squeaky clean uniforms and the headteacher pacing up and down an oak-panelled office, rehearsing the same speech. Again.

Like so many schools, we filled the hall, the auditorium, the car park…We would shake more than 200 hands. By the end of the day, our faces would hurt from smiling.

You would hear from our headteachers, our headboys and headgirls. It was a chance to see the school and observe the reality beneath the surface.

Or was it?

A spectacle 

I cannot tell you how many times a parent has come up to me and said, “Well, that was a lovely speech. But could I have five minutes with the headteacher to get a sense of what he is really about?”

It was a show, a performance - a spectacle some might say. Catch us 15 minutes before open day, and you would see everyone from teachers to admissions officers to catering staff rushing around to make everything perfect.

Afterwards, the debrief: what worked and what didn’t? Weren’t the pupils brilliant? Some great parent conversations. Were the speeches a little too long?

So, as September edges ever closer, and talk of a return to normality builds, the question I keep asking myself is: do we want to return to this way of doing things?

A new open-day normal?

Since 23 March, we have all worked tirelessly to adapt to this new way of living and teaching. Everyone is acutely aware of the gargantuan efforts by our academic staff to deliver the right balance of asynchronous and synchronous learning.

For marketing and admissions teams in schools, we have a choice: to say we can’t do it like we used to, and therefore we are not doing it at all this year, or to think about how to do it differently. It’s become a case of sink or swim.

We are not simply substituting everything we do with a virtual alternative; we are questioning its very purpose and we are being innovative with it.

With the firm belief that a school is not just a building, but a community, we are now sharing some of the most exciting and engaging content we have ever created. Video is de rigeur. Content is coming in thick and fast from pupils, parents and teachers.

The real feel 

And so our virtual open days aim to give a sense of what being part of our school is really like - perhaps even more so than our onsite open day did.

It works by setting a time and date for when we will hold the open day, and then sending a link to all parents so that they can register for it. Staff are then online and able to answer questions as required. As it is all recorded, those who aren’t able to attend on the day can still come along at a later date.

Of course, the key question is: what content do you have for a video open day?

As well as the obvious options, like the head’s speech, a tour of the school and information about the curriculum, we have included elements we hope show the culture of the school

So, you see our headgirl at home, spinning back and forth on her desk chair as she talks, our senior leadership team attempting Joe Wicks workouts, our headteacher feeding his chickens at home.

We are able to show prospective parents our online teaching platforms, how we feedback on work, how we prepare students for their exams, what a Mandarin lesson looks like, and enrichment classes that take the form of baking, gardening and debating clubs.

We can show how we have kept spirits high with weekly competitions from student impersonations of famous paintings, to sock puppets to live theatre with actors’ faces stuck to potatoes.

The possibilities to show the real us feel endless.

Let’s embrace what’s working

And it’s working - with plenty of positive feedback, from people telling us how helpful they have found the videos as a way to get an insight into the culture. Others have said that it’s helped them understand the sort of education their child would receive.

For many school admissions officers and teams, this will be the first time they have truly asked themselves what they do and why they do it.

Should the people presenting the school still be working in the same way as the people running the school? The current times are saying no - and our early attempts at adapting have been a joy.

Of course, we all long to be back in school. But what I hope we take from this experience is a long-term change, which sees us finally mix the old with the new.

After all, we’ve seen it can work, so let’s embrace it.

Rebecca Gibson is group head of marketing and admissions at North Bridge House Schools Group