Schools assemblies can be fun!

April 3, 2019 authise authise

Do you remember your school assemblies? I do, and how I wish I would forget some of them! We had one teacher, who would insist on taking Monday morning assemblies. Sure, you might think that he should be applauded for stepping up and taking on the task that no one else wanted.

But you would be wrong.

In a very short time, Monday had acquired the unenviable title ‘Morbid Monday’. One particularly miserable assembly stands out in my memory:

It was a Monday morning in September. We had barely finished getting our new folders and exercise books for the year. Lockers were full of new textbooks, not yet thumbed beyond recognition, caught in the rain or lost. We had just met our new teachers, and, other than a few bad first impressions, not yet irrevocably fallen out with them. We still had that naïve ‘beginning of the school year’ feeling; we had a clean slate and anything could happen. Hopeful might be the best way of describing it.

Until this teacher got up to speak. That morning we suffered through a twenty-minute talk on the inevitable disappointment that our lives would be; the year ahead would not bring everything that we hoped of it; our university applications would likely result in failure; and our eventual career would not be as we had wished. There was no positive twist at the end. It ended with ‘you will be disappointed; you had better get used to it.’ School assembly was a platform for the musings of a jaded middle-aged man.

I suspect that everyone has a story much like this one. It’s hard to give a good school assembly, and children and teenagers do not make for a kind audience. Teachers receive very little guidance on how to write and deliver an interesting, fun assembly with a compelling message. And it can be even more difficult to know where to begin when it comes to leading collective worship in schools, as all schools in England and Wales are required to do.

That is where SPCK has stepped in to help. In 1998, we set up www.assemblies.org.uk, an online hub for assembly resources. 20 years later, there are now over 1500 assembly scripts on the Assemblies website, which include everything that a teacher would need to run an assembly, such as suggestions for props, songs, PowerPoint presentations and prayer.

There are: assemblies for primary schools and secondary schools; assemblies on Bible stories and Christian themes, as well as a whole section on world religions; and assemblies on pastoral issues that arise again and again, and assemblies on momentous current affairs. On our website, there is an assembly for every occasion!

But you don’t just have to take our word for it. We regularly hear from teachers and members of the clergy who have used assemblies:

“We survive on your website!”

“I used your website just this morning – it’s excellent!”

“The assemblies website is a very useful resource. It has bailed me out on a number of diary-malfunction related times!”

Each month, our most popular assemblies are viewed over 10,000 times and each month we receive around 50,000 visitors to the website. Most are based in the UK, but around 10% of traffic comes from the United States and 2.25% of visitors are based in India! The assemblies website truly is a global platform, and its reach is ever-increasing!

But we’re always looking for ways to improve our offering, and we benefit from a hugely valuable resource in our wonderful authors! Over the Christmas period Alan Barker, author of The Shepherd who Couldn’t Sing wrote a festive assembly for primary school pupils, in which he explores the encouragement that can be found in singing together.

Most recently, Bob Hartman, author of The Rhyming Bible, delivered an assembly to Primary School pupils in London. The video will soon be available on our Youtube channel, and the script will feature on the Assemblies website

If you work with children as a teacher, school chaplain or church youth group leader, then the assemblies website is for you! It’s free to use, and there’s no sign-up required! Browse the current scripts or use the search bar to find a script on a particular topic. The site is really easy to use, and you are sure to find something to help you to avoid being another bad assembly anecdote!