If I were in school at the moment, I’d definitely be wanting to give an assembly about the life and works of Stephen Hawking, who died yesterday. But what would I choose to say? Young people are impressionable. It is easy to get it horribly wrong and send the wrong message by mistake. Telling stories about very talented and clever people can be intimidating, rather than motivating. Telling stories about disabled people, if you’re not careful, can tip over into either pity or inspiration porn, neither of which do anyone any favours. So, I think, if I was doing an assembly, this is what I’d say - accompanied by PowerPoint with lots of pictures to illustrate.

Stephen Hawking, Cambridge University professor, was:

• Born in 1942 (during the Second World War). This makes him the same age as my dad.
• Like me, he had three children (unlike my dad, who has two).
• His book A Brief History of Time sold more than 10 million copies, although nobody knows how many people have managed to get to the end of it.
• He appeared in The Simpsons, Star Trek, Comic Relief, The Big Bang Theory, Futurama and several of his own TV series about his work in maths and physics. He was so famous that he once complained that it was difficult to get about without being recognised. He said: “It is not enough for me to wear dark sunglasses and a wig. The wheelchair gives me away.”
• In 2014, Eddie Redmayne won an Oscar playing him as a young man in the film The Theory of Everything.
• He was born in Oxford. His mother was escaping the bombing in London and worked at the University of Cambridge.
• He was a physicist who studied the Bing Bang, black holes and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity (this is where I would have to admit that I stopped studying physics at GCSE, but that some people find it very interesting because it explains in scientific terms how the world works and that Hawking made a very successful career out of doing just that).
• He used a voice synthesizer to speak for almost 40 years because he had had a tracheostomy.
• He was known to be an erratic electric wheelchair driver. Police once questioned several people about his injuries after he was admitted to hospital in Cambridge. They did not press charges.
• He was diagnosed with motor neurone disease aged 22, which is why he used a speech synthesizer and electric wheelchair. He said, “I felt it was very unfair - why should this happen to me? At the time, I thought my life was over and that I would never realise the potential I felt I had. But now, 50 years later, I can be quietly satisfied with my life.”

Stephen Hawking will be remembered for being an exceptional scientist with a gift for communication and for being a disabled man who, after being given only two years to live, carried on living and working and refused to give up.

There is no doubt that many people will want to use his life and his story to make the point they want to make, tales of overcoming events of great trial and tribulation. I think, if it were my assembly, I would leave it to him to have the last word.

“However bad life may seem, there is always something you can do - and succeed at. While there’s life, there is hope.” Stephen Hawking, People’s Daily Online, June 2006.

Nancy Gedge is a consultant teacher for the Driver Youth Trust, working with schools and teachers on SEND. She is the author of Inclusion for Primary School Teachers. She tweets @nancygedge

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