Public Speaking

from School Magazine 2018-2019

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ESU School’s Mace

Despite having no previous experience of debate competitions, Anouska and I decided to set ourselves the challenge of signing up to the 2018 annual ESU School’s Mace. The competition, which consists of three rounds, requires participants from each school to form a team of two, in which they either debate in favour of or against the debate’s proposed motion. In our round, one team out of six would be able to move onto round 2. For the first round, our motion was ‘This House would build homes on the Green Belt’, for which we were arguing the opposition. (The Green Belt is a policy in British town planning for controlling urban growth, by designating a ring of countryside surrounding a major urban area ofwhich urban development is prohibited). We had a week to research the topic together and formulate our arguments. Being the first speaker for the team, my job was to introduce the main arguments that we would be putting forward against the motion, while Anouska had the job of rebutting points made by the opposition in response to my speech. We decided to focus on the psychological benefits of having access to the countryside, the potential environmental issues that could be created by building on the Green Belt, and the reasons why it would not be an adequate solution to the urban housing crisis. We also researched the benefits of building on the Green Belt and the most popular arguments made in favour of the motion, so that we could try to anticipate the points that our competition would make, in order to rebut them more effectively. We were both permitted 7 minutes to speak, including an introduction and conclusion, which gave us a chance to fully evaluate our side. We felt reasonably confident that our research had given us a solid understanding of the topic at hand, and we showed up after October half term with a genuine shared passionate belief against urban development on the Green Belt.

We arrived at Featherstone School in Southall, ready to give the competition our best shot. While we were both quite anxious to debate for the first time in front of an audience but we gave the competition our best shot. After a long and intense evening of fruitful debate from all participating schools, and too many desserts, we waited to learn the results. Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, we had sadly not managed to make it through to the second round, after impressive competition.

Overall, it was a hugely enjoyable learning experience which gave us the opportunity to improve our debating skills for extra-curricular opportunities in the future and allowed us to meet a variety of students from different schools across London. We would wold encourage any future Year 12s with an interest in debate to consider taking part this year.