Aided by a little bit of time travel, the Year 6 class took us back to 19th-century London with a visit to The Great Exhibition of 1851 – Prince Albert’s celebration of British industry and design. 

In the spirit of innovative design, Peter and William had been working on a time machine (strongly resembling a large black sheet), which was fortuitously ready just in time for the assembly…

They landed successfully in Hyde Park, May 1851, and witnessed a conversation between Prince Albert (Aubrey), Mr Cole (Zak) and Mr Paxton (Joshua), the architect of the venue for the exhibition. The three congratulated themselves on the success of the purpose-built glass and iron structure, which was large enough to house over 100,000 products from all over the world, and became known as Crystal Palace – as Mr Paxton said ‘It was quite the engineering achievement, if I do say so myself!’.

Excitingly, Queen Victoria (Phoebe S) also stopped by to admire the exhibits, which included elm trees (inside the building), a stuffed elephant, a locomotive engine and a marble statue of a slave, where abolitionists had met to demonstrate against slavery. At this point, our time travelling duo are spotted and land back safely in Cambridge, October 2025, where the Year 6 class are poised to share a few modern day inventions that they feel would deserve a place in a Great Exhibition today!

As Zac informed the assembly, the children researched and wrote the following speeches themselves. Phoebe S gave some historical context, explaining that Britain no longer has an empire, as it did during Queen Victoria’s reign, but that we are now part of the Commonwealth of independent nations who once were a part of the empire. Aubrey and Maya spoke about the expansion of women’s rights following WW1, which included gaining the right to vote and to the same education as boys. Phoebe P, Zoe, Arabella and India shared modern art and music, including Taylor Swift and K Pop music. Other topics mentioned were Charlie on AI and Alexa; Izabella on Space Exploration; Peter and Zac on big business, such as Apple and Amazon; Esther on submarines and underwater exploration; Felix on planes, such as the Boeing 747 – the first passenger plane to cross the Atlantic Ocean non-stop; then finally, Joshua, Kavira and William on the invention of cars, and in particular racing cars and electric cars. 

Year 6 finished their assembly with a prayer, thanking God for all the wonderful things we have learnt about from the Victorian period into the modern world.

Thank you Year 6 and Mrs Watkins – your enthusiasm for the creative inventions and discoveries you shared was contagious!

What was the greatest invention ever? In the first Infant and Junior Assembly of the new academic year, Mr Fletcher gave a surprising answer…

First, he gave us a whistlestop tour through the prehistoric period, taking the children back ‘a long, long, long time ago’ to the Jurassic Period, when the chalk hills south of Cambridge were under water and dinosaurs walked the earth; through the Stone Age and the beginning of farming; then into the Bronze Age when humans started to make things out of… bronze. Although impressive, none of this was the greatest invention ever.

The greatest invention ever was in fact so remarkable, he said, that everything that has happened since is what we call ‘history’, whereas everything that happened before is called ‘prehistoric’ because we know so little about it. So what did Mr Fletcher say was the greatest invention ever? It is writing. It was such an amazing invention, he said, that it would be best to describe everything that has happened since the Stone Age, including the period we now live in, as the Writing Age. ‘What makes the invention of writing so special is that, for the first time, people were able to make their words permanent.’

Mr Fletcher then outlined the development of writing, starting just over 5,000 years ago with the cuneiform tablets of the Sumerians and Egyptian hieroglyphics. Then about 3,500 years ago, he described the extraordinary discovery made by the Phoenicians. ‘They very cleverly realised that words people spoke were made up of a relatively small number of sounds, combined in loads of different ways. They worked out that if you could identify each of those sounds, and give each of them a special mark, then you could write any word that anybody could ever speak’. These marks, he said, are what we call ‘letters’ and they make up what we call an ‘alphabet’.

According to Mr Fletcher writing is the greatest invention ever for two reasons. First, it makes it possible for large numbers of people to work together and form complex societies. Second, and most importantly, he said that writing helped everybody to think better. ‘When you take time to write down what you want to say, you have to think carefully about what words you will choose. And then, as someone else comes along to think about that same thing, and they read those words, they start with a great advantage. By reading what someone else said about something, it helps them in their own thinking.’ The best words got passed down from generation to generation, Mr Fletcher said, and, in this way, knowledge grew, and grew and grew.

Here was Mr Fletcher’s conclusion for the pupils: ‘Writing is what has made civilisation possible. So, here at the start of a new year, we wanted to especially encourage all of you to take pride in your writing. It really is the greatest invention ever!’