Top Year Six Leavers' Assembly Ideas

Advancing from primary to secondary education is a momentous occasion for children in the UK, and it is our responsibility as teachers to recognise their achievement with a leavers’ assembly that they will remember in years to come. While this milestone is cause for celebration, the thought of leaving their school, their teachers and — in some cases — their friends behind can make this transition challenging for some children. For this reason, it is integral that your Year 6 leavers’ assembly inspires your students to cherish their primary school experience and gives them the confidence to progress in their academic journey.

In this article, we will offer our insights on leavers’ assemblies, explaining their importance to your Year 6 students and sharing ten fantastic leavers’ assembly ideas that will round off their primary school experience on a high!

What Is a Year 6 Leavers’ Assembly?

A Year 6 leavers’ assembly is the final assembly that students attend before saying goodbye to their primary school to begin the next stage of their education. This is an important milestone for children, as it gives them the opportunity to celebrate their achievements, reflect on their experiences and build their confidence before starting in secondary school. 

Understandably, this can be an emotional time for some students, especially those with additional needs such as autism who struggle with change and the unpredictability of new experiences. For this reason, planning exciting and joyous activities for your Year 6 leavers’ assembly is crucial to ensure your students are left with positive memories of their time in primary school and feel empowered to take on the next chapter of their academic story. 

Our Top 10 Leavers’ Assembly Ideas

1. Awards Ceremony

There is no better way to recognise the achievements of your Year 6 leavers than through an awards ceremony. This classic leavers assembly idea involves creating inspiring award categories and then allowing your students to nominate their classmates for each category. These could include awards for their performance inside the classroom, such as ‘neatest exercise book’ or ‘most helpful with tidying’, as well as acknowledging contributions to the school community with awards for ‘biggest team player’ or ‘kindest friend’. Once you have your nominees, teachers and students can vote for who they think is most deserving, then awards can be handed out ceremoniously during the assembly. 

What you will need:

• Paper and pens for students to cast their votes
• Ballot box for students to submit their votes
• Awards, such as certificates, badges, trophies or sweet treats
  

2. Memory Slideshow

Presenting your students with a slideshow of pictures and videos of their time in primary school is an excellent way to capture their happiest memories while showing their progress from the start of their school journey. For this assembly idea, ask your Year 6 leavers to contribute their favourite photographs and videos from class projects and school events throughout the years, so that you can create a visual timeline of their primary school experience. This could include their primary school nativity, environmental efforts, sports days, school trips and fundraising events. Be sure to send messages home to parents, too, in case they have any hidden gems to contribute!

What you will need:

• Photographs and videos
• Projector
• Backing music 

3. Religious Service

Many faith schools incorporate their religion into their leavers’ assembly, dramatising a parable with a relevant moral or conducting a Year 6 leavers’ service at their local place of worship. A popular Bible story in Church of England schools is The Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25:14-30), which encourages children to use their skills and abilities to achieve success in their future, rather than hide their talents for fear of failure. This religious lesson should embolden your students to pursue their passions as they enter the new world of secondary school. 

Alternatively, you could incorporate religion into your Year 6 leavers’ assembly by singing hymns with your students or teaching them to play one on musical instruments. Music is a fantastic way to bring your students together, encouraging your confident performers to showcase their talents while enabling your more reserved students to participate within the safety of their choir or band. 

What you will need:

• Costumes
• Acting props
• Musical instruments
• Hymn sheets
  

4. Tree Planting Party

Planting trees with your students is an excellent way to incorporate the environment into your Year 6 leavers’ assembly, while serving as the perfect symbol for their academic growth. Accompanying the children onto the playground, school field or your chosen planting plot, you can supervise the students as they plant samplings in memory of their time at primary school.

While you are digging holes or securing the saplings within their spirals, you can lead your students in songs about the environment, make speeches about the environmental friendliness of tree planting, or draw comparisons between the growth of the trees and your students. As the saplings grow from little twigs into strong trunks, your students will grow into capable young adults as they embark on the next stage of their academic journey.

What you will need:

• Trees
• Spades
• Spirals
  
• Canes
  

5. Leavers Quotes

One of the traditions popularised by the American school system is the creation of leavers’ quotes in the yearbooks of their graduating classes. Whether positive, poignant or downright hilarious, these quotes give students the opportunity to immortalise their personality in the memory of their peers. By showing your Year 6 leavers examples of yearbook quotes and giving them time to reflect on how they would like to be remembered, they can create their own quotes to read aloud during your leavers’ assembly or add to a physical yearbook.

What you will need:

• Pens and paper
• Yearbook printing company of your choice
  

6. Art Exhibition

Collages are a staple of harvest festival assemblies, so why not let your Year 6 leavers let their creativity flourish one last time with an art exhibition? By tasking your students with depicting positive school memories or allocating certain colour palettes to different children within your class, you can create a beautiful medley of their primary school experience when pinned to your display board. 

Alternatively, your class could embark on a mosaic project, such that each piece of artwork contributes to a complete picture that will feature prominently during your Year 6 leavers’ assembly. Working individually or in groups, your students can sketch out the sections of the larger image, then use their preferred art supplies to infuse their part of the picture with their unique artistic flair.

What you will need: 

• Paper
  
• Pens and pencils
  
• Paints and brushes
  
• A display board 

7. Poetry Reading

Writing and reciting leavers’ poems can provide more emotionally vulnerable students with a constructive outlet to process and express their feelings about leaving their primary school days behind them, while allowing them to flex their literacy skills.

Whether they want to write a quatrain about their fondest memories, teachers and classmates, recount a classic classroom moment through a limerick, or condense their primary school experience into a haiku, encouraging your Year 6 students to write leavers’ poems allows them to capture their experience in verse while learning about different types of poetry. Presenting their poems during the leavers’ assembly is equally an excellent confidence-building exercise.

What you will need:

• Pens and paper
  

8. Talent Show

Rather than limit your students to one creative pursuit, organising a talent show for your Year 6 leavers’ assembly gives your pupils the opportunity to showcase talents that are more difficult to accommodate in their regular curriculum. Holding auditions in your school hall will allow your students to mentally prepare for performing in front of their peers, while giving you an idea about who might need some coaching behind the scenes. Less confident students could form group talent acts, or contribute to the talent show in other ways, such as making posters to promote each act, overseeing the backing music, introducing the acts, or collecting votes from the audience.

What you will need:

• Props
  
• Backing music
  
• Prizes for the winners
  

9. Devised Performance

For less competitive cohorts, banding together to create their own play is an excellent idea to celebrate community during your Year 6 leavers’ assembly. Whether they want to shine the spotlight on school issues, such as bullying, stealing or cheating, get some laughs in the form of a farce or comedy review, or lean into the fantastical by casting themselves as knights, monsters or superheroes, this leavers' assembly idea gives your students complete license to take ownership of their grand farewell. 

While you may have plenty of budding actors and comedians who are more than happy to take centre stage, less extroverted students can help write the scripts, get involved with sound and lighting, or hold up signs to indicate when the audience should cheer, boo or laugh.

What you will need:

• Costumes
  
• Props
  
• Signs
  

10. Musical Performance

Putting on a school musical is a brilliant way to bring your students together at the end of the school year. At the School Musicals Company, we have plenty of leavers’ musicals designed for older primary school students that impart meaningful messages while making for memorable end-of-year celebrations! Whether you whisk your students away to the magical land of The Wizard of Oz or embroil them in the nefarious schemes of Mission Implausible, staging one of our musicals for your Year 6 leavers’ assembly will end their year on a high note, while passing on important lessons about friendship and bravery. Each of our leavers’ musicals comes with plenty of helpful resources, including physical and digital scripts, character lists, curriculum-linked material, sheet music, lyrics, and songs with backing tracks, relieving you of all the stress and planning.

We appreciate that staging a musical can be time-consuming, so you could always incorporate some leavers’ assembly songs into your celebration if you want to send off the year in song! Our songbooks are packed with catchy tunes containing relevant, uplifting themes, including being thankful for primary school relationships and experiences, as well as getting excited for the next step towards secondary school. Many of these resources are accompanied by leavers’ assembly packs which provide clear instructions on how to organise your last hurrah, as well as sheet music, lyrics and two versions of the song (one vocal version and one backing track). 

What you will need:

• Script
  
• Music tracks
  
• Songbooks
  
• Costumes
  
• Props
  
• Musical instruments
  

We hope this article has given you some ideas for your Year 6 leavers’ assembly and that you are as enthusiastic as your students to see out their primary school experience with an epic celebration! For more Year 6 leavers' ideas or thoughts on how to bring some excitement into your weekly assemblies, the School Musicals Company has an abundance of information on our blog, not to mention the fabulous KS1 and KS2 assembly songs in our collection! Explore our articles and products today, or get in touch with us to be directed to the assembly or musical resources you have been searching for.