The last day of term is an emotional one in primary schools. The Year 6 leavers’ assembly is more highly charged than the Higgs boson. As I grabbed my register and squeezed through the packed group of waiting parents, I noticed that several of them were clutching tissues and were already moist about the eyes.
There’s a sense of occasion about this assembly that sets it apart. The parents are always the first to buckle. Barely five minutes in, there were audible tears as the children read poems, performed sketches and reminisced about the past seven years. They finished off by singing and swaying, arms around each other.
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Sometimes pupils manage this without crying, but not always. It’s like dominoes - one goes, and they all follow.
Romantic thresholds
I’m not a fan of sentimentality. We over-romanticise thresholds. Children can’t leave nursery these days without having a “graduation”, complete with gown and mortarboard. I even know of schools that mark the passing of Year 2 children to the next-door classroom with a ceremony that includes cakes and balloons that have “Last day as an infant” written on them.
For Year 6 children, leaving primary now takes about a week, once the party, the awards night and the assembly have all been ticked off.
Only, this time, my heart of flint hadn’t factored in the PowerPoint. It played alongside the last song: a slide for each child, with a photo of them aged 4 and one as they are today. The watching children found these hilarious, which helped because I was struggling to hold back tears.
Personalities and quirks
Often, we can be fooled into thinking that teaching is purely about progress - moving people up a graph, before moving on to do it again with a new batch of people. Sometimes it’s only when you watch the leavers’ assembly that you realise that’s not it at all. Looking at these leavers, I genuinely had no recollection of who did well in which test. I could just see their personalities, their quirks, how they’d changed and grown up and how young they still were.
And, almost always, there is a lot to celebrate. The children who led a deforestation protest when some trees on the school grounds were felled; the children who rushed for help when an elderly man fell near their playground after school; the children who hold doors open for you and ask if you’ve had a good lunchtime.
If you take time to look, what you actually see in primary schools are countless small acts of selflessness and spontaneous kindness.
Walking in other people’s shoes
Even on the final day, there was Matthew. The children were donating their school shoes to an overseas charity. At the end of the day, any child who wanted to could line their shoes up in the hall and leave the building barefoot. Matthew was desperate to donate, but he didn’t have permission.
“Can I just leave them anyway?” he pleaded. “They said those boys in Africa couldn’t play football without shoes. I want them to play football.”
I looked down at his shoes, at the tattered sole and the holes in the front.
“Don’t worry Matthew,” I said. “There are lots of shoes going. I think you need yours.”
He walked back to the classroom looking dejected, while I considered the possibility of swapping his own shoes with one of the nearly new pairs of trainers I could see.
A few minutes later, the final bell had gone and we were all heading for the playground and summer holidays. Matthew, laden with exercise books, flung himself at the door to hold it open for me. “After you, Miss,” he said.
The Year 6s may have left the building, but we still had Matthew. Everything was going to be OK.
Jo Brighouse is a pseudonym for a primary teacher in the West Midlands. She tweets @jo_brighouse
