AT the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, the All Hallows School community joined together with people across the nation to observe the ceremony of remembrance.

More than 1,400 students and over 100 staff listened to a reading of the poem In Flanders Field followed by The Exhortation, with the whole community repeating ‘We will remember them’.

A rendition of The Last Post played by Mikel Pascuel, a cornet player from the Alder Valley Brass Band, signalled the beginning of the two-minute silence with The Reveille drawing the silence to a close.

The ceremony was completed with the familiar words from Laurence Binyon’s poem, For the Fallen.

Students at All Hallows spend the weeks leading up to the ceremony reflecting on the sacrifices made by so many in defence of our country’s freedom. This year assemblies have focused on the role that women played in World War I.

The art department produced wreaths of felt poppies made with students from two local junior schools, St Joseph’s and St Patrick’s and these wreaths, along with ceramic poppies from the 2014 Blood Swept lands and Seas of Red memorial at the Tower of London, were displayed in the school’s chapel windows, forming the perfect back drop to the two-minute silence.

In 2013, All Hallows was chosen to be part of the Anglo-Belgian Flander’s Field Memorial Garden project where Belgian school children gathered soil from British Commonwealth cemeteries in Flanders and at a moving ceremony attended by his the Duke of Edinburgh at the Menin Gate in Ypres, on November 11, passed on that soil to British children.

A year later, All Hallows took part in the inauguration of the memorial garden at the Horse Guards barracks, joined by students from OLVI Pius X school, in Belgium.

This year, a group of All Hallows GCSE history students worked on a documentary about the role of Clandon Park in the First World War. They discovered that at the beginning of the war, wounded Belgian troops were sent to Clandon and several of them had been fighting in the town of Dendermonde, near to All Hallows’ Belgian partner school.

As a result of this remarkable link, future projects between the two schools are now being planned.

All Hallows’ history teacher Linda Jones said: “The two-minute silence is an important moment for the whole of the All Hallows’ community to gather together in a shared reflection of the human cost of conflict.

“It is important to teach the next generation to remember and give thanks to those who made the ultimate sacrifice for our future.”