Last year, we saw a big increase in requests to bring groups of students to our university for a visit. While these are some of our favourite activities to deliver, there are important factors to keep in mind when making a request.
We hope this blog will help you plan your visit and ensure your students have a meaningful experience. Please note we are writing this from the City experience, but we hope it will help you with booking visits with other universities too!
Planning a Visit
We know that it’s a lot of work for you to bring students to a visit on campus. It’s often assumed that it’s easier for the university, but sometimes it may be easier for us to come to you! We also have to manage health & safety, risk assessments, timetabling, staffing, and preparation for the sessions. We are therefore happy to discuss which option would be best for you and your students.
It’s also important to remember that we reserve the right to accept or decline any request we receive. While we would love to help every school and deliver all the activities we are asked for, it just isn’t possible. Priority will be given to key feeder schools where the students are likely to benefit most from a specific visit to City.
Who to Contact
Each university’s outreach setup varies. If you have an outreach contact, start with them. Otherwise, we’d recommend searching for “schools liaison” or “outreach” on the university’s website or using external sites like Unitasterdays.
If universities have multiple outreach teams, they may need you to contact a different team or may need to swap event requests between them so you’re dealing with the right team. Check the university’s outreach webpage first to see if they list multiple contacts and make sure you email the right one based on the year group your request is for or the activity in question.
Where possible, we encourage you not to try and organise visits through other staff members, such as academic or teaching staff. The outreach teams are the ones who look after the logistics of hosting under-18s on campus, and arranging your visit through us ensures that everyone is looked after appropriately while in our buildings.
Top Tips
- Give notice: Request visits well in advance. University spaces are hard to book during term time, and staffing requires coordination. Visits in June/July can be easier for us as our students have gone home, but they book up quickly! If your visit requires teaching staff, we also need extra time to plan sessions around their commitments.
- Be honest about numbers: Accurate student numbers help us staff appropriately. While our visits for schools are always free, we lose money if we overstaff with Student Ambassadors. Smaller size visits are welcome and, although we know you can’t control dropouts on the day, honesty about numbers upfront ensures the best session delivery for the students.
- Check subject interest: Most of the visits we deliver are generic, but we also arrange subject-specific ones. For these, please only bring students interested in the subject and studying relevant qualifications. This ensures the students get the most out of sessions with teaching staff.
- Check year group: Be clear about the year group(s) you are requesting the visit for, as different teams within the university may work with different year groups and can provide tailored content for them.
- Manage expectations: Share the session schedule with students in advance. Prepared students gain more from the visit and their expectations are better matched. Students should also follow school behaviour standards during visits. Our staff dedicate a lot of time to these sessions, and managing behaviour issues detracts from the experience for others. We ask all staff on visits to manage behaviour issues so we can focus on delivery.
We hope these tips help you plan successful university visits!