Dialogue caught up with George and
Amir from Wallington County Grammar
School (Sutton).
Why did you enter the competition?
GS: We’d heard of the London
Debate Challenge before and as it was
run by the ESU we knew it would be a
very high standard of competition. We
were not disappointed!
AH: We entered primarily because
we were interested in improving our
debating skills and accessing a wider
range of competitions (especially
those for our ages, as most schools
competitions are up to 6th form). It was
our teacher that did all the paperwork
for us.
Were you familiar with debating prior
to the London Debate Challenge?
GS: Yes. We all had some experience
of debating before, we currently run
both a senior and junior society at school
and have been able to attend a few local
and larger competitions through that.
AH: All three of us were very familiar
with debating prior to the competition,
especially George and I. We had been
doing debating for a few years at various
schools competitions held by different
universities, however these were always in
‘British parliamentary’ format which meant
that the ‘Extended Mace’ format used at
the LDC was a challenge for us. Our prior
experience helped a lot with structuring a
speech and analysing our points.
How did you prepare for the finals day?
GS: When the motions were released
we took quite a relaxed approach and
we didn’t prepare for the final because
we thought that we weren’t going to
get into it. However, in the final we
found that having loads of statistics did
not necessarily mean that you will win
as we were able to develop some more
principle based arguments and this was
what the judges highly valued. We knew
we would face teams that had all won
their regional rounds and expected the
standard to be really high!
AH: We tried to attend as many
debating competitions as possible
throughout the year to be able to better
ourselves in general. We also run a
debating club after school in order to do
this. We didn’t really prepare specifically
for the LDC throughout the year,
however we were always looking to get
better at debating overall. We wrote out
some notes for the pre-prepared debates
beforehand for both sides of the motion.
On the journey to SOAS, where the
finals day was being held, we discussed
the various motions with our teacher - Dr
Young - as well as filling in any gaps we
had in our preparation.
How did you find the topics?
GS: The topics were very clear and
we were able to judge what the debate
was actually about.
ESU| 15