Ways of planning and recording Collective Worship

A school will need to establish both a Collective Worship Plan and a Worship Record. It is sensible to combine the two documents into one, by producing a form of weekly planning sheet which can be filled out in advance then amended or completed to form the worship record.

This form of record keeping has several advantages:

It enables the collective worship co-ordinator to monitor continuity and progression as a worship theme unfolds. It also prevents undue repetition, when several worship providers wish to adopt the same story to illustrate a theme.

Occasional worship providers, such as the clergy and regular visitors, who may not see other acts of worship underway, will understand how their assembly fits into the overall pattern of a theme.

It will be easy to demonstrate that the School has provided daily collective worship according to its Anglican Trust Deed and Ethos Statement.

Schools registered with the Christian Copyright Licensing Scheme will have a record of the hymns they have used.

A final section on evaluation or monitoring the collective worship will assist future planning. (This may be comments as simple as "story proved inappropriate for age range", or "difficult to maintain atmosphere due to noise from lawnmower" but schools should also consider other appropriate matters such as layout of room, briefing of visitors etc. under this heading.)

The most important thing to do is to find a method of record-keeping which is appropriate to your circumstances, manageable, and sustainable. Too much detail can make the whole system cumbersome and unworkable.

A collective worship planning grid normally has the following headings:

• Date
• Theme
• Worship leader
• Content or main focus
• Resources used
• Music/ hymns
• Pupil participation
• Comment /evaluation

Evaluation

A school should consider:

• Who is involved in the evaluation of collective worship. As well as teaching staff, this could include the pupils themselves, or members of the governing body.
• The frequency of evaluation - daily, weekly or half termly. It should be sufficiently frequent to impact upon future planning.

Contents

1. What is worship?
2. Collective Worship and the law
3. The Anglican Tradition
4. The Aims of Collective Worship
5. The Policy
6. Ways of planning and recording
7. Planning Issues
8. Collective worship ideas and support on the world wide web
9. Asking Visitors to lead worship
10. Guidelines to be given to Visitors to lead worship
11. Are Assembly and Collective worship the same thing?
12. Themes and schemes for planning collective worship
13. Bible stories for use with collective worship themes
14. Involving pupils in Collective worship

Document Downloads

• Collective Worship in Church Schools