Assemblies are a key part of school life and their importance and purpose are underlined by the fact they almost always take place at the start of each school day and the energy it contains.
However, as someone who has worked in numerous schools, I have seen assemblies range from the sublime to the ridiculous - the latter of which have usually been clearly put together at the last minute by a put-upon head of department or time-poor headteacher desperate for an idea.
Where there has been a clear purpose and structure to assemblies, though, the difference has often come down to the fact there was a clear timetable for assemblies, which provides numerous benefits:
1. The right person for the job
By planning out your calendar in advance you can ensure you get your expert teachers on the correct assembly.
You’re unlikely to want your head of maths picking up a memorial assembly about a historical event that is best left to your history teachers, for example, while someone from the science department celebrating a science or technology-related event would likely be a lot more suitable.
The key thing is that by planning in advance you can ensure the right person is aware of their responsibility and has time to prepare.
Furthermore, if you advertise the opportunity for staff to lead an assembly, you may get individuals volunteering whom you never thought would, helping spread the workload.
2. Ensure school priorities are given focus
A lot of school changes - especially around behaviour, but in other areas such as uniforms, attendance, homework and more - require consistent re-enforcement, as well as a drip feed of new expectations, chiefly with pupils but perhaps with teachers, too.
By planning out your calendar, you can place these at helpful intervals and ensure there are consistent reminders of expectations coming through to the community.
3. No surprises
By planning ahead you can ensure there are no unexpected changes to the tutor programme or impacts on lessons, which can be a frustration to tutors, heads of year and teachers.
On a given day, it may not seem like much but add it up over a year and you may inadvertently be eating away at precious contact time.
4. Ensure the correct content is covered
By having a timetable, you can ensure all key requirements that need to be covered within an assembly are spoken about.
This may be legal requirements around safeguarding, extremism, British values or the PSHE curriculum that you choose to cover in an assembly, or more functional requirements, such as college applications, GCSE choices or awards ceremonies.
This should avoid the need to play catch-up at the end of the year when you realise a key session has been missed.
5. Spotting outside speaker opportunities
With a timetable in place, you will also be able to identify clear opportunities in the year where you could get outside organisations and speakers to come in to lead an assembly.
This can help ensure the best possible assembly takes place, reduces burdens on staff to take every assembly and can give pupils something new to think about and engage with.
6. A consistent event
The final benefit of doing all this is coherency.
You will likely have themes that you want to include during your assembly programme and by planning these out over each term or the whole year in advance, you can ensure different topics come up in the correct order, at the correct time.
This will mean the necessary themes and messages build upon one another in a coherent and clear manner, rather than contradicting themselves or having no thread at all.
Nathan Burns a former secondary head of mathematics
