Woldingham School Virtual Tour: Aerial Entry and Plan My Visit

Woldingham School is a Catholic boarding and day school for girls aged 11 to 18, set in the Surrey Hills and part of the Sacred Heart network of schools. We built it a bespoke 360 virtual tour that lets a family walk the campus without leaving home, see the rooms their daughter would use and find out what to do next. The tour has 26 scenes in eight areas, an aerial view as the way in, a Plan my visit route builder, four languages, a school FAQ and directions inside the tour, and a full set of accessibility settings.

It is one of our bespoke 360 virtual tours, with an interface designed for the school in its own pink and dark purple, and one of the tours on our school virtual tours page. Below we walk through the features and why each one is there.

An aerial view as the way in

The tour opens on a drone view of the whole campus, looking across Main House, the Quad and the playing fields to the valley beyond. It does the job a map does on other tours: a visitor sees at once how the site fits together. Labelled hotspots mark the buildings and places around the grounds, from Berwick House and Marden to Shanley and The Hub, the tennis dome, the swimming pool, the vineyard and Orchard Field, and a list of twelve of them sits on the scene card. Pink circles on the aerial are the way into the ground level 360s, and a blue P marks where visitors park.

26 scenes in eight areas

The scenes are grouped the way a family thinks about a school, not by building: Main House and grounds, Sixth Form and library, Boarding and daily life, Sport and outdoors, Music, drama and dance, Science and art, and Faith and wellbeing, with the aerial view as the first area. A panel on the right lists the areas as an accordion, each with a thumbnail for every scene and a count of how many have been seen, so a visitor can jump straight to the Library or the Science Centre and always knows how much is left.

Each scene has a card at the bottom left with the name of the space, a short description, a “Read more” link for the longer text and a Next button that carries on through the campus in order. A scene can also point to related places in other areas under “More to see”: the Chapel, for example, points to Lumina in The Hub.

Plan my visit

Most families do not want to look at all 26 scenes, so the welcome screen has a second button next to Start exploring: Plan my visit. The visitor ticks what matters most to their family from seven interests, and the tour puts together a short route that starts at the front of Main House, where every visit to the school begins. The button counts the places as the choices are made. In the example below, two interests, Sport and the outdoors and Music, drama and dance, give a visit of nine places.

The route is marked on the scene card as “Your visit”, with the stop number, and the scene list marks the stops that belong to it. The planner is also in the tour’s help, which says a planned visit can be shared with anyone the family likes, so a parent can send it to a partner or a grandparent.

Walking through the rooms

Ground level scenes use labelled arrows to move between rooms, such as the one in the Goddard Room that leads on to the rear of Main House, the fishpond and the Pergola Walk, so a visitor can follow their curiosity rather than the set order. Pink plus signs mark something worth knowing, and choosing one turns the view to it while the text is read. The first time a visitor starts, a short prompt says it is an interactive 360 view and to drag or swipe to look around, and a Help panel in the top bar explains looking around, moving between scenes, discovering hotspots and planning a visit.

Questions, directions and a way to ask for a visit

A Questions panel in the top bar answers the nine things families ask most, from when a daughter can join, boarding options and how the application process works to fees, scholarships and bursaries, visiting and international students. It ends with “Still have a question?” and buttons to email admissions or open the school website.

Find us opens a map of the school’s location with a Directions button and the school’s minibus routes, with the towns they serve and how far each is from the school, and the nearby railway station. A “Visit us” button stays at the top right of every screen, and the final scene of the tour points to it as the next step, so a family that has just seen the Chapel does not have to go looking for what to do next.

Four languages

Woldingham welcomes families from overseas, so the whole interface can be switched between English, Simplified Chinese, Spanish and French. The choice is in the top bar and on the welcome screen, and the welcome message, buttons and panels change with it. The tour says the translations are provided to help families from overseas and that the admissions team will be happy to help if anything is unclear.

Accessibility

An Accessibility button is on the welcome screen and in the top bar of every scene. It opens a panel with a text version of the tour that lists every scene and hotspot as plain text, and display settings for high contrast, larger text, always showing hotspot labels, reducing motion so nothing turns or slides automatically, and hiding the hotspots altogether. The tour can be used with a keyboard or a screen reader, there is a skip link to the text version at the very top of the page, and the panel gives the school’s registrar email address for anyone who finds something hard to use.

On a phone

The tour also has its own layout for phones: the same welcome screen and aerial view, a compact scene card with Read more, and a button for the areas panel. Visitors swipe to look around and the prompt says so.

If you run a school, college or campus and want a tour that works the way a visitor thinks, talk to us about a bespoke school tour. Every tour is quoted on the plan, with no travel charges in mainland UK, and hosted by us with no yearly fee. You can also open the Woldingham tour and look around.