Wimbledon High School: A Student-Led Admissions Video Success Story
Education and admissions video production: a new take 🎬
When you're marketing a school, there's a lot you want prospective families to know about. The facilities. The opportunities. The results. The curriculum. The extracurricular activities. The things that make your school different.
The challenge? Fitting all of that into one promotional film without it feeling like a list.
Because for a child considering a new school, the questions aren't necessarily about everything on offer. They're more personal: “What will it actually be like to go there?”
That was the starting point for this project with Wimbledon High School GDST, where the aim was to create a film that gave prospective pupils and parents a genuine feel for the Year 7 experience.
Joanne Joyce, Director of Marketing and Communications at Wimbledon High School GDST came Olympix Media with her initial vision:
"We were keen to share the POV of our students, highlight how they settle into school and the support they receive, speaking to both prospective students and parents. It needed to be something that felt quite fun and lighthearted versus more serious like the films we have made in the past."
We love a creative challenge at Olympix Media, and this project gave us the perfect opportunity to approach school video production a little differently.
So, rather than taking a traditional approach to education video production, with the school and headteacher explaining what it offers, we developed a concept that put the students at the centre of the story. Because while a school naturally wants to communicate its strengths, a child thinking about the move into Year 7 might be wondering:
Will I make friends?
What will my first day feel like?
What are the teachers like?
What's the community and atmosphere like?
These are the details that can make a new school feel much more tangible. So the creative idea was simple: Let the current Year 7 students tell the story.
Developing a student-led concept
Many education marketers we speak to face the challenge of showcasing everything their school offers without simply listing everything it offers.
Research from the Department for Education's 2024 parent survey found that 29% of parents of secondary school pupils considered school values and ethos when choosing a school. This shows the importance of communicating the experience of attending a school alongside its more tangible benefits.
For Wimbledon High School GDST, our aim was to show prospective families what being part of Year 7 actually feels like.
Working closely with the marketing team, we developed three creative concepts before agreeing on the direction for the film. We then created a framework script, storyboard and key messaging to give the production structure while leaving room for the students' own personalities and perspectives.
Our team met with the students before filming and ran a hands-on workshop with the DJI Osmo Pocket 3, helping them get comfortable behind the camera and play an active role in telling their story.
Student-led content needs the right balance. Too much scripting can lose the natural personality that makes it relatable, while too little structure can leave the story without focus. Our approach gave the students room to share their experiences in their own way, while keeping the school's marketing objectives at the heart of the film.
This resulted in a more personal way to communicate the school's culture, told by the people who experience it every day.
While the students filmed parts of the experience themselves, our team also captured the story from a third-person perspective, adding wider shots of school life to complement the students’ own footage. This helped tell a fuller story, showcasing the school’s atmosphere, facilities and community while keeping the students’ experiences at the heart of the film.
Watch the final film here:
One production, multiple admissions touch points
We wanted to give the marketing team more than just one great film. The goal was to create a whole suite of content they could put to work across their admissions campaign, from social media to open days and beyond.
Across two shoot days, we captured enough material to create a small suite of content around the main film:
1 Ă— Hero film: The main Year 7 promotional film, designed to give prospective families a genuine feel for the Year 7 experience.
4 Ă— Social cutdowns: Shorter edits taken from the wider story, giving the school additional content that could be used across its social channels and admissions activity.
A new suite of drone footage: Fresh aerial footage of the school and its surroundings, giving the marketing team a new library of high-quality establishing and location shots to use across future content.
"To date, we have shared the hero video on our website, on social (with great supporting social edits produced), at our open events, and via a QR code on a student facing postcard at primary school events."
A school doesn't necessarily need more content, it needs the right content. Planned around the audiences it needs to reach and the things it needs to communicate throughout the year.
What school marketers can take from this project
The strongest education films don't necessarily try to say everything. They find a clear story that helps the right audience understand what makes a school different. For marketing teams planning their next video project, three questions are worth asking:
Who are we really speaking to? Think about the questions prospective pupils and parents want answered, not just the messages the school wants to communicate.
What do we want our audience to feel or understand? A clear creative focus can be more effective than trying to fit everything into one film.
Where will the content be used? Planning for websites, social media, open events and future campaigns can help you get more value from a production.
Wimbledon High School GDST already knew what made its Year 7 experience special. Our role was to work collaboratively with the marketing team and students to find the best way to communicate it.
Sometimes, the most effective way to tell a school's story is to let the people who experience it every day do the talking.
"Working with Olympix Media on this project was fantastic – from the initial concept through to support as we developed the storyboards and the final delivery – they thought of everything and were so flexible. The video campaign has landed really well and works for both prospective parents and students. It's great to have film that effectively communicates the culture of the school (fun, girl centred, community of younger and older students)"
Thank you to the Wimbledon High School GDST team and students for trusting us with this project.
Planning a school video or admissions campaign? Find out about our education video production services.
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