12 Year 6 Leavers' Assembly Ideas, Organised by How Much Time You Have

Written and reviewed by the Starshine Music editorial team: teachers, composers and editors whose musicals are performed by more than 14,000 UK schools.

The quick answer

A Year 6 leavers' assembly marks the end of primary school. It usually runs between twenty minutes and an hour, takes place in the final week or two of the summer term, and is watched by parents, staff and often the rest of the school.

The twelve ideas below are grouped by preparation time rather than by type, because time is the constraint that decides everything else in the summer term. Start with the section that matches what you realistically have left.

If you have two weeks

1. The memory slideshow

Still the most reliable item in the whole assembly. Ask families for photographs from every year group, not just Year 6, and run them in chronological order so the children visibly grow up on screen. Set it to a song the cohort already knows and you have a five minute item that will reduce half the hall to tears.

2. Awards with real thought behind them

The trick is to avoid anything that ranks children against each other. Categories like Best Question Asked, Most Improved Handwriting or Kindest Playground Moment let you give every child something true and specific. Write the citations yourself rather than voting, so nobody is left out.

3. Reflective readings

Each child reads a short paragraph about a classmate, describing a strength and how it will serve them at secondary school. Written by the teacher, read by the children, and genuinely moving.

4. Two or three songs together

Even a spoken assembly lifts enormously with singing in it. Choose songs the children can learn in three or four sessions, and use backing tracks so you can stand at the front and conduct rather than sitting at the piano with your back to them.

If you have three to four weeks

5. A talent showcase with a job for everyone

Group acts move things along faster than solos and suit less confident children. Around the performances, hand out the other roles that a showcase genuinely needs: compere, sound, poster design, running order, front of house.

6. Letters to their future selves

Each child writes to the person they expect to be at sixteen. A handful are read aloud in the assembly and the rest are sealed, kept by the school or sent home. It gives you a literacy outcome and a memorable item from the same piece of work.

7. A short sketch the class writes itself

A courtroom scene, a mock news bulletin or a spoof of a school day. Children who dislike acting can write, direct or hold up cue cards, and a class that has written its own lines learns them far faster.

8. A leavers' song cycle

Somewhere between an assembly and a full show. Pick five or six songs, thread them together with short spoken links written by the children, and you have a twenty five minute centrepiece without a script to rehearse.

If you have six weeks or more

This is where a proper production becomes possible, and where the assembly stops being a collection of items and becomes an event. All of the following are drawn from our Year 6 leavers' musicals.

9. A show with something to say

Year 6 respond far better to material that takes them seriously than to anything pitched younger. Bully! runs fifty five minutes with nine songs for ages eight to twelve, and works as a PSHE experience as much as a performance, since it explores why a bully becomes a bully rather than simply condemning one. Change The World Together is fifty five minutes with eight songs for ages eight to eleven, following a girl who is right about the climate long before anyone listens.

10. A show built on dance

Move It! is a street dance musical running fifty five minutes with nine songs, for ages eight to twelve and upwards, in which two crews compete and an angry outsider finds his place. It has succeeded in schools with no dance specialist at all, because the pack includes dance cards illustrating thirty two street dance moves that children can assemble into routines themselves.

11. A show that ties into the curriculum

The Keymaster sends a class time travelling through 1066, the Tudors, the industrial revolution, the suffragettes and the Second World War. It runs sixty minutes with twelve songs, and you can stage the whole thing or pick and mix scenes, which makes it work for casts from thirty right up to a hundred or more.

12. A show that fits an awkward cast size

The Button Box has only four scripted parts, with everything else built around eleven songs that travel the world. It runs fifty minutes and takes any number of children at all, which solves the problem of a cohort too large for a conventional script.

Make sure every child has a moment

Look at your running order and count how many children are named or seen individually. If the answer is fifteen out of thirty, the assembly is not finished yet. Speaking is not the only way to be visible: a child can hold the microphone for the awards, run the slideshow, introduce an item or lead a section of a song.

Group speaking helps too. A line delivered by six children together is a line six children have learned and performed, and for anxious speakers and children with speech and language needs it is often the difference between joining in and standing silently at the back.

Three things that catch schools out

• Leaving it until June - Summer term disappears into SATs, transition days, sports day and residential trips. Choose your material in the spring term and you buy yourself the one thing you cannot make more of later.

• Underestimating the emotion - Leavers' assemblies are more affecting than staff expect, for children as well as parents. Put something light near the end rather than closing on the most moving item, so the children go out laughing.

Forgetting the licence - Buying a script or songbook gives you the materials, not the right to perform them publicly. For virtually all published shows a performing licence is required in addition to the purchase, and an assembly with parents watching counts as a public performance even though no tickets were sold. If you plan to film it for families, check that separately. Our licences and copyright page sets out what is needed.

Frequently asked questions

Not sure which show would suit your year group? Our team are all experienced teachers and would be very happy to talk it through with you.

Tel: 01323 508881 Email: office@starshine.co.uk

About Starshine Music

Starshine Music Ltd has published musicals, nativities and children's songs since 2003. Every script is written by experienced teachers who understand the pressures in schools today, and every title is trialled in schools and other settings before release.