At the school I attend, Tiffin School, we have a house system in which we compete over a series of events such as House Number Brain ( a maths competition ), House General Knowledge and House Football. Currently, that house that I am part of, Darwin Wilberforce is leading the house championship.
The most recent event I have taken part in is house debating in which three other members of my house also competed. After a few weeks of debating training, the time had finally come to put our skills to the test in two rounds of debates.
These debates followed a British Parliamentary format with two pairs of debators arguing for the motion as the proposition and two pairs arguing against the motion as the opposition. In British Parliamentary, the speakers are given specific names reflecting the origins of the format in parliament. There are several roles in the debate which are the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, the Government Member, the Leader of the Opposition, the Deputy Leader of the Opposition, the Opposition Member and the Opposition Whip. The role of the Prime Minister is to define the motion and the role of the whips is to summarise the argument outlining why their side has one the debate.
The first round begun after school on Monday 21st March and the motion was “This house would change the national curriculum to reflect black history”. My partner and I were arguing against the motion and had the roles of Opposition Member and Opposition Whip. This debate was quite hard for us as a pair because it is hard to argue against this motion without coming across as being offensive or racist. Unfortunately, we placed 3rd out of 4 in this debate, only not coming last due to the fact that one of the times failed to provide a pair and only one member of the pair turned up who spoke for two roles but only had one of the roles counting in the scoring.
The second debate began after school the following Monday on the 28th March and the motion was “ This house would lower the voting age to 16”. My partner and I were the Government Member and the Government Whip. It is fair to say that in this debate I felt far more confident being the Government Whip. The arguments I put forward were that the benefit to young people is far more important than the benefit to the rest of society and that the benefits of allowing those age 16 outweigh the negative effects. In this debate, my partner and I placed 3rd out of 4 .Individually I was the best speaker but my partner struggled to fill all the time.
I extremely enjoyed the house debating competition despite not scoring a huge amount of points. I find that debating makes me a more confident speaker.
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