How concerned should I be about a chaotic open evening

[10YellowTulips]

My DD is in Y6 and we recently attended the open evening for our closest and preferred secondary school.

Due to the pandemic, we did not have an opportunity to visit in Y5 so our preferences were based on ofsted, school website and local hearsay. My expectation of the school and reality could not have been more different at the open evening. The "event" was chaos from start to finish. It was not clear where visiting families were supposed to go and no one seemed to take charge. A small number of students were on hand to help but there was not enough of them to go around and they didn't have a clue what they were supposed to do. Most of the staff didn't seem to know either. It was pretty obvious there was little or no central organisation and staff and students hadn't received instructions about what to do. The head's speech was decent and individual teachers I spoke to were fine but I am now worried the whole place is disorganised and that this will hamper general school life and learning.

Am I right to be very concerned or could this be an isolated blip?

Welcome to secondary education!

From general experience, the schools that pull out all the stops to put on amazing open evenings are the undersubscribed ones. Popular schools are the ones more likely to phone it in a bit as they'll get applications anyway.

@noblegiraffe

From general experience, the schools that pull out all the stops to put on amazing open evenings are the undersubscribed ones. Popular schools are the ones more likely to phone it in a bit as they'll get applications anyway.

Fair enough and that was obvious when we went to an undersubscribed one which went all out with goody bags etc. I wasn't wanting or expecting that. But finding a person who could tell us where we should go would have been nice.

There could be many reasons. They may have had a high number of Covid cases so not enough staff & students available to help or they were unwilling to go into a crowded situation. Maybe the number of people who turned up was more than expected. Maybe the main organiser was unable to attend at the last minute. Maybe they are so oversubscribed they don’t need to put on a show at Open Evening.

Why not see if you can book a daytime visit when you will get a feel for a normal school day.

At DS’s school they would usually have lots of students across year groups showing parents around. This year, there were very very few and the tours were more self guided. I can imagine that it could have appeared chaotic but they were trying to keep numbers down.

DC's school were short of student helpers due to so many people being off with either Covid or colds. This was also true for staff as well.
Plus lack of focus on the Open Day might well suggest that the staff were focusing on their existing students (which is a good thing).
If the head's speech was decent and conversations with individual teachers were fine, then I wouldn't worry.

DD helped out 2 weeks ago on a Saturday. The PPs saying it’s all been thrown up in the air by Covid are spot on.When we toured her school three years ago there were far more pupils at hand to help and we as a family got two taking us around. Poor DD (who is v shy) got given 4 families to take around on her own in one go ( two of which wandered off!).

@EmmaGellerGreen

At DS’s school they would usually have lots of students across year groups showing parents around. This year, there were very very few and the tours were more self guided. I can imagine that it could have appeared chaotic but they were trying to keep numbers down.

I don't think that was the case here. At one point we were told a student would take us round except there were none. Eventually one student was found and took a large group of 30 or 40 of us round and it was very crowded and the opposite of covid safe!

I will attend a daytime visit before making a final judgement but I really was not impressed. The school is oversubscribed but certainly not the most popular one around.

When we visited two grammars, the open evenings were well organised even though hundreds of families attended. They are hugely over subscribed with wannabee parents! We didn’t go anywhere else in the state system but friends found everywhere they went was good enough but the talks from the Heads varied!

It would not be the Head organising this. Usually it’s delegated. So Assistant or Deputy might have dropped the balls! Usually open evenings are a on annual repeat - you do the same every year! But of course someone has to organise it and take charge. Seems they didn’t but if progress 8, ofsted and every other measure looks good. I would forgive them.

We were turned off completely to a school (private!) that had a chaotic open day. These schools need applicants, no matter how popular they are.
It wouldn't take much to organise things better - split it over two evenings if hundreds are expected, appoint ambassadors that know the school inside and out, and so on.
But talk to other parents of the school if you can, it may just be a one off or just not a true reflection. But the fact you are having doubts just underlines how important these things are to get right (we didn't apply to the school in the end).

Dh and I did a day time visit after the open evening. We were toured round by the year 7 head of transition because our son was going to a school that none of his friends were going to and we wanted reassurance. However, the open evening was very well done but this was way before Covid which I believe has affected staff and pupil numbers. Ds2 is still at the school.

Lots of teachers would not give up two evenings. Ambassadors might think the same if they have lots of homework!

Private school open days tend to be slick but we discounted a poor one. Head didn’t turn up for his talk. Kept everyone waiting a long time. Interesting pupil showed us round. We were looking at 6th form. DD kept in touch with her. She didn’t stay on in the 6th form! We felt the school needed a good shake up. Head moved on and it got one! I think parents do judge presentation and pupils. We had lots of choice but many state school pupils don’t.

We looked at 2 schools for DS. The first was the much sought after over subscribed school. Open evening was well organised, HT impressive and welcoming and a good display of activities in each department. I also went on the daytime tour with DS.
Other school was not the local school of choice but was our catchment school. I couldn't go to the Open evening due to DD being in hospital but DH went with DS. The event was disorganised in the way you described - student volunteers not knowing what they were supposed to be showing. The HT had done a talk at our Primary and had invited parents to drop in and look around any time - so as I'd missed the open evening I took up the offer. Seems he'd not bothered to tell his front line staff that he'd offered that invite! They did eventually find someone to show me around. But to be honest it was definitely a reflection of how the school was run. A couple of years later the governors were sacked en masse and the HT wasn't far behind them. We were grateful to have got DS a place at the more organised school.
(This was a few years ago though so didn't have the complications of Covid which may be impacting on their disorganisation).

My daughter started year 7 in September. We haven't even set foot in the school so don't worry that you couldn't visit 2 years before she started 😮

I didn't apply to the schools whose open evenings I or my daughter didn't like and actually applied to some schools that weren't top of my list because I was so impressed by the open evenings. That's the whole point of them

She we were looking for my dd2, we visited our nearest school although I really didn’t want her to go there. At the car park gates there were 4 students to direct visitors to the staff car park - they were sharing a cigarette whilst telling us where to go 🤣🤣🤣

Sounds pretty normal.

Not where I live. Total no no!

I'd be put off a bit tbh. We have a well- rehearsed programme/route/routine that's been used since the year dot that just gets a tweak when something gets highlighted. Obviously a new presentation each year and most departments switch things up in terms of what they put on but the nuts and bolts of it is the same. We did have a few less student guides than usual this year, due to as others have said the absence rate, but it seemed to run fairly well the same as ever. We just had staff a bit further out in the corridors to keep an eye for anyone looking lost or confused without a student tour guide, and things were a bit more staggered (more head's presentation slots, so it was a bit shorter in length) to keep the numbers a bit more steady, but it was good to be back to a version of 'normal'.

I'll put my tin hat on but it's not that hard to run an open evening if you've got a decent set of staff, leadership and a general plan/framework that you know works to hang from.

We couldn't go the our choice of high school open evening due to COVID + but we booked in for a one-one walk round with the head. We seen the kids in the classrooms, the switch over from different lessons, canteen etc. I think it was much better because nothing could of been staged or putting on their best faces. Made us feel a lot more happy with our choice. I'd book to do this if you have the option.

In 2017 for DS1 to start in 2018, we went to two open evenings, both schools 11-16 as schools with sixth forms are all in another part of the borough, and the only one with a sixth that takes students from our area under 16 is a school which was reinvented some years ago and sounds like it's doing a good job. I did suggest we might look at school C for the sake of comparison but DS1 wasn't interested, didn't know anyone going there etc.

School A, OFSTED outstanding in another part of the area we live in which is the much poorer eastern side of our borough. The student who was showing us round seemed quite difficult to talk to, and I'm not sure she was well prepared on what her role was.

School B: OFSTED Good, 5 minutes walk from home. No reason why my kids shouldn't be able to do well there though they need pushing to do their homework and not get too distracted by other stuff. We started with a visit to see the school chickens before looking at some of the more conventional academic things, the library etc, and there was some really interesting stuff organised in the science labs which really grabbed DS1's imagination - dissection (ugh!, but really well done in terms of how to make it interesting for prospective students), experiments to demonstrate various concepts in a fun way. So much better done than School A and DS1 made his preferences clear. He's acquired a really good group of friends, and most live really close to us - one or two are a bit further away but still within easy walking distance or a very short hop on the bus.

DS2 chose to go to the same school and couldn't be persuaded to look anywhere else and consider other possibiliities.

They might well have made the same choice anyway, and it's worked out pretty well so far, but the better atmosphere of the open evening for our local School B did really help convince me. And I'm reassured that a number of mums I know who I thought might have made more prestigious/popularity driven choices actually sent their kids to School B. One asked for her son to be moved into DS1's class in year 8, and he's now one of DS1's closer friends among the group.

DS1 and his friends do spend quite a bit of time hanging out, but they've also made some decisions influenced by each other which seem a bit more academically positive - doing Further Maths GCSE including additional lesson time and taking up Computer Science.. It's quite handy when you';re trying to chivvy a teenager into something they're not sure about and then you find out one of his best mates is doing that thing too, I was able to say to DS1, oh A and his mum were on the Zoom meeting earlier and A asked a question and that worked better than anything else I could have said!