ESU Churchill Public Speaking Competition

We enjoyed great success in the ESU’s Churchill Public Speaking Competition last week with our Year 10 team of Christy, Alicia and Tara winning their qualifying round and going through to the London regional finals for thesecondyear in a row. Christy again won the coveted’Best Speaker’ prize whilst our new Year 9 team of Govhar, Sofia, and Natasha performed strongly with Govhar and Sofia winning prizes for’Outstanding Personality and’Best Questioner’ respectively. 

Debating Matters

A team of four Year 12 students attended the first ever Debating Matters’championship’ event at Queen Mary University in Twickenham last week. Yasmina and Darcy took part in a debate on the dangers of contact sports whilst Shan and Ama argued against retaining monuments to controversial historical figures. Both teams faced tough cross-examinations from the professionals on the judging panels and received some great feedback.

ESU Mace 

Our team of Phoebe and Orla represented the school in the second round of the ESU’s Mace competition last week – the first time a Putney team has made it this far in the UK’s most prestigious debating competition. They took on St Paul’s Girls’ A Team in a very technical debate on whether or not the rich should be allowed more choice over how their taxes are spent by the state. The standard from all four teams involved in the round was incredibly high and although Putney were not selected to go through, the girls really held their own and proved that the school can compete at the highest levels. 

Cambridge Schools’ Debating Competition

In the first championship outing for the Debating Society since it was founded last year, Putney took three teamsto the Cambridge Union’s schools’ competition last week. Sofia& Govhar from Year 9, Zosia and Anna from Year 10 and Anna and Sylvie from Year 11 represented three of the 48 teams of two attending to compete in the British Parliamentary format, debating the merits of plea bargaining, violence in video games, women only tech companies and artificially removing fear from the minds of soldiers. Our teams placed in the middle third of the final tab – a great achievement for such a young side on its first outing.