-- Independent schools should rethink the expensive, single-use prospectus film and give their admissions teams more ways to show everyday school life, according to Tom Crooke, founder of video production company Bobbin. Speaking on the day of the Autumn Budget, Crooke argues that the financial pressures surrounding independent education require a different approach to school marketing: content that works throughout the admissions cycle, rather than a major production that leaves little behind for the team commissioning it.
VAT at the standard rate of 20% has applied to fee-paying private school education and boarding since January 2025. For Crooke, the question facing school marketing teams is how to explain their school’s value consistently while making better use of the resources available.
For families weighing up an independent education, the financial commitment brings closer scrutiny of what a school offers and how it spends its money. Parents want to understand where the fees go, what their child will gain and whether the school manages its resources responsibly. For marketing and admissions teams, that means making the value of everyday school life visible: the quality of teaching, the care pupils receive and the opportunities that make a meaningful difference.
“Parents aren’t choosing a camera move. They’re choosing the people who will teach their child, the environment they’ll grow up in and somewhere they’ll feel they belong,” he said.“A beautiful prospectus film can open that conversation. But it cannot answer every question a family will ask over the following six months.” Crooke believes schools should assess a shoot by what their marketing and admissions teams can do with the material afterwards. A teacher explaining a subject, a pupil describing their first term or an ordinary moment of encouragement can each serve a different purpose: introducing the school to a prospective family, supporting an open-day invitation or answering a question before a visit.
Yet that flexibility can disappear when schools receive only a finished film or a hard drive of unsorted camera files. “The most useful question before a shoot is: what will our team be able to make from this in three months’ time?” Crooke said. “If the answer is that they’ll have to commission another edit every time they need something different, the original price is only part of the cost.”
His argument is that professionally captured footage should become a working resource for the school. Selected, colour-graded clips can give an in-house team material for website updates, short social videos, admissions campaigns and digital displays, without requiring a fresh production for every use. He also believes the growing availability of AI-generated imagery makes authentic footage of school life more important. “A parent wants to understand this school, these teachers and the experience their child might actually have. That gives schools a powerful reason to capture their own people well,” he said. For Crooke, that means keeping production small enough for people to relax and for normal school life to continue.
His approach combines advance planning with documentary filming: agreeing the activities and locations beforehand, then leaving room for genuine interactions rather than scripting every response. “You can plan the lesson, prepare the room and make sure the sound is right. You cannot manufacture the moment a pupil lights up because they’ve understood something,” he said. “The job is to create the conditions to capture it, without turning the classroom into a film set.”
Bobbin says it reached production capacity in 2026 and plans to expand its Content Days team and equipment provision in April 2027, creating five additional places for independent schools on its annual packages. The packages combine planned shoot days with reusable footage libraries, unlimited edits and unrestricted usage licences, giving school teams material they can continue using across their own channels.
Marketing and admissions teams can register interest in the April intake now through Bobbin’s early-access registration, which closes at the end of January 2027. “The pressure on schools makes it more important to question how production budgets are spent,” Crooke added. “A shoot should leave the school with something useful long after the crew has packed up.”
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