How to plan a Science Week that does not eat your whole timetable
5 min read
Science Week has a way of expanding. It begins as one good idea in an October staff meeting, and by the middle of February it has become a whole-school theme, a parents’ assembly, a poster competition, an investigation in every classroom and three days where nobody is entirely sure where Year 4 is meant to be. The science usually does get better. The timetable does not.
It does not have to work that way. A week that genuinely lifts the profile of science in your school can be built around one fixed point - a single day where every class does something they could not do in a normal lesson - with a light touch everywhere else. What follows is the running order we see working most often, taken from schools that host a full day of workshops and still teach a normal Thursday afternoon.
Start with one fixed point, not a theme
Themes are the reason Science Week grows. Once the week has a title, every subject wants a slice of it, and the science lead ends up organising a programme rather than teaching science. Invert it. Book the one thing that is genuinely hard to organise - a visiting workshop, a trip, a science fair evening - put it in the diary, and let the rest of the week arrange itself around it. Most of the classroom work you had planned will still happen, because it was always going to be a lesson rather than an event.
Six sessions, one hall, one class at a time
The mechanics of a workshop day are simpler than most schools expect. Sessions run 45 to 60 minutes depending on what your school needs, with one class at a time, and up to six fit into a normal school day - enough to take a one-form-entry school from Reception to Year 6 without anyone missing more than one lesson. Everything happens in a single space, so your hall is committed for the day while the rest of the school carries on as usual.
A workable running order looks like this.
- 08:15 - the facilitator arrives, unloads and sets up. All this needs from you is an open door and a parking space near it.
- 09:15 - first session. Start with a middle year group rather than Reception; it gives the day a settled opening.
- 10:00 and 10:45 - two more sessions, with morning break falling between them rather than through one.
- 11:30 - the session before lunch, kept for a class that eats in the second sitting.
- 13:15 and 14:00 - the two afternoon sessions, finishing in time for the last class to be back in their own room before the end of the day.
- 15:30 - pack down. The hall is back to normal before the site team locks up.
Two details are worth getting right. Send classes to the hall rather than asking the facilitator to come to them, because moving a class set of equipment costs far more time than moving thirty children. And put the year group you are least sure about in the middle of the day, once the routine is established and you have seen for yourself what a session looks like.
Protect lunch, PE and anything with a coach booked
The hall is the constraint, and in most primary schools the hall is also the dining room. Work out which of those two facts wins before you publish a timetable. If lunch has to be served in the hall, the day splits into a morning block and an afternoon block with a real gap in the middle; if you have a separate dining space, sessions can run closer together. Either arrangement works perfectly well. Discovering it on the morning does not.
The same goes for the things you cannot move: a swimming slot, an external sports coach, peripatetic music lessons, an intervention group that runs at a fixed time. Send us that list when you book and we will build the rotation around it. It is much easier to plan a day around a Tuesday PE lesson than to pull a class out of one.
The schools that get the most out of a workshop day are not the ones that clear the timetable. They are the ones that tell us exactly what cannot be moved.
Brief your staff on one side of A4
Staff do not need a briefing pack. They need to know five things, and they need to know them the week before rather than on the morning.
- Where to be and when - the rotation, printed, in the staffroom and in every classroom.
- What the session covers, so they can set it up in the lesson before and pick it up in the lesson after.
- That a member of school staff stays with their class throughout. The facilitator leads the session; the class teacher knows the children.
- What pupils need to bring, which is usually nothing, and what they should sort out beforehand - long hair tied back is the only common request.
- Who to tell in advance about a child who may find the session difficult, so it is planned for rather than managed on the day.
Book earlier than feels sensible
British Science Week in March is the busiest week of our year and it fills first, often a term or more ahead. If your week is fixed to those dates, get the date held early. If it is not, consider putting your science week somewhere quieter in the calendar. A workshop day in late September or in June is easier to book, and it gives science a presence in a term that does not already have one.
Deciding what to put in the hall for the day? Science Faction puts real chemistry on real tables, one class at a time, and works well as the fixed point of a science week.
See Science FactionNone of this needs a plan longer than a page. One fixed point, a rotation that respects lunch, a briefing your staff can read in two minutes, and a date held early enough to be the one you actually wanted.
