A number of applied school science courses recommend that students should make a site visit to some aspect of the chemical industry.  Such visits are often difficult to organise and some areas are almost impossible to get access to.  Major constraints on organising visits to laboratories, pilot plants or production sites are time, space, safety and compliance with Good Manufacturing Practice.  Visitors are prohibited in some areas when active large scale chemistry is underway and therefore planning visits weeks in advance becomes impracticable.

To partly address the needs of applied science courses and some A-level chemistry courses, virtual visits of the chemistry laboratories and pilot plant on GlaxoSmithKline sites have been created (see 'Activities' below).  Although students can navigate round them at leisure, there may be benefits from them being teacher led using a projected image from the web site.  Questions are also provided to enhance the learning experience.