'In the midst of continuing ill-informed media rants and political pontificating about poor quality education, uncommunicative young people and adolescent apathy, it was a delight to find myself in the real world earlier this month, judging the South East England Regional Finals of the Institute of Ideas’ Debating Matters competition. Each having already won qualifying rounds against 3 other schools, teams from six schools debated challenging motions on the 2012 Olympics, organ donation, the sustainability of population growth, and the role of social media in political protest. These are complex issues which the participants had clearly researched and on which they articulated sophisticated and well-informed arguments.
In my experience, school debates can be ill-prepared and poorly presented or highly formulaic and procedural. Such approaches don’t work in Debating Matters, which requires that participants – or, at least, the successful ones – investigate issues, assess what is useful to an argument and what is superfluous, predict and contest opposing positions, ask and respond to searching questions from a panel of judges as well as from the opposing team and from the floor of the debate. Schools are allocated a topic and told in advance which side they must argue then, working initially from topic guides, they have to develop not only their speeches but their responses to possible questions and decide upon the questions they think will expose the weaknesses in their opponents’ case.
The judges included academics, journalists, policy analysts, corporate executives, pressure group campaigners and alumni of the competition from previous years –people who take the topics and the debaters seriously. We also have to be prepared for the day, asking challenging questions and getting involved in sometimes heated discussion with the participants who do not shy away from disputing judges’ interpretations and opinions – which is as it should be. Despite the current vogue for ‘pupil voice’ I am not convinced that I should accept someone’s opinion simply because they are young; equally, however, there is no justification in expecting the young to accept my opinion just because I’m old.
The day ran from 10 am until 5.30 pm at the Canterbury Christ Church University Salomons Campus near Tonbridge. By the end of it I was tired, having judged two debates and listened attentively to two others; the nervous tension associated with winning or losing must have made it exhausting for the participants and their teachers. The final debate addressed whether “Social Media is rejuvenating political protest” and, apart from a personal quibble with syntax (‘media’ is a plural, after all), I thoroughly enjoyed Godalming College’s eloquence and determination to win the day in the face of well-argued and perceptive presentations by their opponents from Sir Joseph Williamson’s Mathematical School (aka Rochester Math). The judges’ decision could not have been easily reached but it did concur with the vote from the floor – not a requirement in these debates, as the school which packs the room would otherwise always win.
There were a number of well-deserved individual prizes as well as significant prizes to both the school and individual members of the team which came second. The winning team, from Rochester Math, were again given impressive individual prizes as well as school resource vouchers worth £500 and a place in the national final in London at the end of June. A further prize was provided by one of the sponsors and the team will have a private dinner with a former head of MI6 at the Reform Club – if the team is as well-prepared and perceptive as they were on Tuesday, he might wish he had taken the easier option and stayed in the secret service.'
- Ralph Leighton is the author of Teaching Citizenship Education, a complete guide to citizenship education, challenging teachers to enable pupils to make a difference to themselves and to society.
Jenny Tighe
