Why open days need no booking

We debated adding a booking form to open days for a long time, mostly for headcount planning. It would have made the operations side easier. We didn't add one, and the reason is worth stating plainly: a booking form is a small commitment, and the parents most likely to skip a small commitment are the ones who haven't decided yet whether this is worth their time.

An open day exists specifically for that undecided parent. Someone who has already committed doesn't need to watch a session running as normal before enrolling — they've enrolled. The value is entirely for the person still on the fence, and that person is the one a booking form loses first.

Operationally this means open days sometimes run light and occasionally run over capacity, and we've made peace with both. A session that's slightly crowded because more people showed up than expected is a better problem than an empty room because the form was one click too many.

The instructors running these sessions treat them as a normal delivery day, not a performance — no staged demo, no rehearsed pitch. What a visiting family sees is what an enrolled family gets, which is the entire point.

A booking form on an open day filters out exactly the parents who most need to see a session before deciding anything — the ones still deciding whether to trust us at all.