dialogue Winter 2013-14 | Page 17

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