Debate Hub Highlights

Our award-winning Debate Hub programme continues South Hampstead’s proud tradition of encouraging pupils to express their opinions.

Debate Hub was established in 2019 and continues to grow out of our commitment to give young women a voice. Over the past year, our numerous lunchtime and after-school debate clubs have become increasingly popular, whilst our top debaters continue to excel at a national level. Some highlights include:

• Leila and Eleanor in Year 11 winning the Gold Final of the GDST Seniors Debating Competition, ranking first and second as speakers
• In the GDST Juniors Debating Competition, three teams made the Gold Final (Marina and Arya in Year 9; Olive in Year 8 and Julia in Year 9; Pearl in Year 8 and Bella in Year 7); Amelie and Lakshanaa in Year 8 made the Silver Final, while Hosanna and Anjola in Year 8 won the Silver Final; Julia in Year 9 was ranked as best speaker in the competition, whilst two Year 7s ranked in the top ten – Hailey and Edith
• At our new ‘mix and match’ format competition, where pupils form teams with debaters from other schools, Matilda and Hosanna in Year 8 were in the joint winning teams
• Rihana in Year 8 and Julia in Year 9 made it to the Finals’ Day of the International Competition of Young Debaters, competing at the Oxford Union

Another key aim of Debate Hub is to enable schools across the UK to increase their oracy provision, empowering more students to have the opportunity to learn to speak up and speak out.  As well as providing a wealth of online resources for state schools, we now run some of the biggest and most popular school debating competitions in the country. This year alone, we have hosted dozens of competitions and workshops for over 80 schools, reaching more than 1000 pupils, and we start the summer holidays with our Bingham Debate Competition, welcoming over 200 state school pupils from 20 different schools. We have also started to offer corporate training sessions, delivered by our expert coach Mr Hepburn, with all proceeds invested back into our state school partnership programme – find out more.