About us
Christ Church Schools Team aim to support Primary and Secondary Schools in delivering assemblies / Collective Worship and R.E.
Our assemblies/Collective Worship which are Christian in nature, are fast-moving, magazine-style which are fun, high energy and high quality. All of our assemblies have been trialled in multiple schools in the Winchester area.
During Covid-19 we were unable to schools in person, the Christ Church Schools Team produced online assembly videos for schools to use. We are now back in schools sharing our assemblies / Collect Worship with over 4000 children, 7 times a year.
Assemblies - Structure, delivery and themes
Each assembly includes an introduction to the theme, a Bible story, short talk with application, song, questions and prayer. All of our assemblies are written to be relatively simple, without elaborate staging - you don’t need to juggle or do magic! Our assemblies are originally written for teams of three, but if you wanted to, you could use the scripts to lead one single-handedly, drawing in other teachers or children to help you act the story out.
We visit schools seven times a year. Three in the autumn term, two in spring, and two in summer. We have some sense of the seasons in our assemblies:
September will generally include a call to love your neighbour as it is the first one of the new academic year, so relationships and welcoming in new people are especially important.
October may be linked to harvest and generosity.
December will be about Christmas.
The second half of the spring term will be about Easter.
The second half of the summer term will have a ‘moving on’ feel to is as children are thinking about moving classes, teachers, and schools.
In-school R.E. workshops and church visits
The Christ Church Schools Team can host school-based workshops and church visits for both primary and secondary schools.
Primary Schools
We have produced R.E. workshops that work with Understanding Christianity and the Hampshire, Isle of Wight, Portsmouth and Southampton Agreed Syllabus: Living Difference IV.
We also welcome primary schools for in-person church visits.
Secondary Schools
We offer both in-person and virtual church visits. Our in-person visits can be as long or short as needed. They can also be adapted to best serve your syllabus needs.
Schools Minister
The Schools Team is led by our Schools Minister Eli Stewart. Alongside working for the local church Eli has spent the last 12 years working as a Teaching Assistant and E.L.S.A. (Emotional Leaning Support Assistant) at a local primary school. Her time working in schools has helped Eli to have an understanding of how schools work and the needs they may have.
History
We can trace our assemblies back to 2004. After a team from Christ Church Winchester visited Uganda and worked with children there, a church member challenged the church to think about how we could do the same in Winchester. A schools’ visit was organised on the Easter story, where children could ask questions about topics such as the weeping Mary at the foot of the cross, or Peter at the empty tomb. After this, invitations came in from local primary schools to lead assemblies, and since that time, the numbers of schools visited has continued to grow. We now visit 27 schools.
We have certainly made some big mistakes along the way, when we haven’t prepared as well as we should have, but we have learnt from our mistakes and now have detailed team guidelines to help us to be as effective as we can be. One headteacher wrote:
“I have been evaluating our collective worship events with the children, via our School Councillors, and without exception they enthuse about the acts of worship led by your team. They would love more of them...”
Lockdown and social distancing has meant the team weren’t been able to visit schools, but has also led to this opportunity to make our assemblies more widely available through videos.