Falkner House Girls’ School - 28th April 2025

It was great to begin our Debating and Public Speaking club at Falkner House Girls’ School.

Our first two weeks will involve an introduction to debating format and key public speaking skills. This week we turned to debating structure and our skills of the week, ‘how to build a proposition argument’, the best use of ‘body language’ during a debate or presentation setting, and ‘persuasive public speaking’ tips including rhetorical questions, flattery and statistics. We will continue to review these skills over the coming weeks.

Throughout we are looking to build on points made with supporting justification: from questions, to stories and evidence.

Each session also involves (as warm-up) a newsround. This took in: Trump’s tariffs, the passing of Pope Francis and funeral, the Canadian election, the War in Ukraine, the London Marathon, earthquakes in Myanmar and Turkey, and the all women Blue Origin Space mission. We also reflected on the recent events in Kashmir.  

We then divided into teams for our set-piece debates. The motions:

• ‘This House believes the Blue Origin Space mission was a great event for humanity? & not a publicity stunt’

• ‘This House believes that UK should reduce our imports of the avocado to help the environment’ (on the back of Alan Titchmarsh's recent comments) 

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In voting, each debate saw an almost exact three-way split (with a category for undecided) at both tellings, with some excellent extended proposition and opposition argumentation.

A super start - very well done all!