Assemblies
Assemblies are a key part of school life at Beckfoot Phoenix Primary Special School.
They are a great opportunity to celebrate our school values and to bring the school together.
Some assemblies through the year are whole school gatherings, eg. at the end of our focused curriculum weeks, eg. Caring Me, Active Healthy Me, and celebration assemblies such as Eid, harvest, Chinese New Year, Christmas. For these assemblies, we have lots that we want to 'show and tell', and we often have to hold more than 1 assembly to accommodate the 150 visitors who often want to come and watch. This is fantastic and shows the terrific support that our community has for our school. We also celebrate these themes with whole school parades which are very exciting when all children attend the assembly workshop and then dress up to parade round school with themed banners, lots of music, dancing, and fun!
Every week, we hold weekly assemblies. These are led by Sarah, the head teacher, and are like the rest of our curriculum - active learning experiences. There are 3 of these each week, with 2 bases - about a third of the school - coming together for each assembly. In these assemblies, the emphasis is on all children taking part, on children from different bases working together, and on everyone being kind, tolerant and respectful. We sit in a large circle so that everyone can be involved and everyone's voice can be heard. Sometimes, we have visitors to these assemblies, eg. Guide dogs for the Blind, and other times, we learn about things that are important to our lives, eg. bullying, and friendship. We also learn about important events eg. Remembrance day, Guy Fawkes night.
A very important part of these assemblies is pupil voice. At Beckfoot Phoenix, we always say that the most important people in our school building are the children! So we want to hear what our children have to say. We have a very special 'pupil voice box' that children can post their thoughts and ideas in throughout the year. In assemblies, we use our pupil voice box to find out what children think about different parts of school life. Using a pictorial 'voting slip', children's responses have changed school practice about school dinners, play times and about the curriculum and lessons.
