What can attractions do to encourage schools to book more post-lockdown visits?
As visitor attractions and the hospitality industry start to re-open, a question mark remains around school visits. When and how will this vital revenue stream return to pre-pandemic levels? And what can VAs do to nudge it in the right direction over the next few weeks?
Official guidance states that educational day visits can resume in line with the government roadmap (from 12 April 2021), with relevant Covid-19 secure guidelines and regulations adhered to.
But there’s more to it than government guidance, on both sides of the programme. Obviously, it won’t be a case of slipping easily back into business as usual. Many VA Learning department staff remain furloughed or working reduced hours, and Learning programmes will have to adapt to these new circumstances, on top of Covid-19 regulations, as they rethink on-site school visit procedures.
On the schools’ side, teachers, parents and pupils are likely to have new concerns about health, safety and logistics that visitor attractions will need to address, as expressed by one Deputy Head of a school in southeast England:
“We’re itching to start planning school visits again but there will be new questions in the school planning process. Will we have to keep to our bubbles? Will we be kept separate from other schools? What measures will be in place to ensure teachers and students – and parents – are comfortable visiting?”
Visitor attractions that have developed virtual learning programmes during lockdown will have a natural advantage, thanks to their consistently engaged audiences and maintained relationships with schools.
Culture Perth & Kinross developed a new website for engaging their younger audiences, for example, and Museums of the University of St Andrews developed a new tool for teaching, creativity, and public access to the collection. Even smaller attractions that managed to share simple colouring-in sheets or host live workshops and talks for homeschoolers and bubbled classrooms will be in a better position to re-launch their educational visits than if they were starting from scratch.
But if you’ve not been able to develop your digital learning offering, it’s not too late to work on building new relationships and breathing life back into lapsed relationships with schools. Doing so could encourage more school visits to your visitor attraction.
The first step is to prep answers to new questions likely to come up in schools’ risk assessments, such as:
- How will you keep school groups in their bubbles when it comes to toilet stops and lunch breaks?
- What is your provision for mass hand washing or sanitising?
- What transport options are safest and easiest for large groups to reach your attraction?
- How will interactive and hands-on exhibitions be managed?
- What Covid-19 testing procedures do you have in place for tour guides?
- What proportion of the visit will be spent outdoors vs indoors?
Having clear answers to these questions will help reassure teachers conducting school visit risk assessments that your visitor attraction is a safe place, and enable them to answer questions from nervous parents effectively. It might be a good idea to publish these as FAQs in the relevant section of your website.
You should also look at how you’ll need to adapt your school offering to meet current government guidelines while ensuring a great visitor experience for everyone at the attraction.
- How might school visits impact individual visitors?
- How will you change the ways visitors interact with more hands-on elements of your VA?
- Can you move parts of your programme outdoors?
Once you’ve got these new processes in place, you can start promoting the relaunch of your school visits programme, helping position you front-of-mind for when teachers begin to book school trips once again.
