Worthing Mayor’s Youth Debate

Last Thursday, ten EXAC students took part in the first ever ‘Worthing Mayor’s Youth Debate,’ which saw them taking on three other local schools in the council chambers of the town hall. This event provided debating debuts for Tia and Abbie in Year 9 and Louise, Billy, Heidi and Abdul in year 8. Experienced debaters Willow, Libin, Drew and Thomas made up the rest of the team.

Willow brings us this week’s blog entry:

Excellence Academy students attend the Worthing Mayor’s Debate

By Willow- Year 9 Excellence Academy

Durrington High School’s debating teams, made up of Excellence Academy students, took part in the Worthing Mayor’s Youth Debate on the 26th of April at Worthing Town Hall.

The school participated in two debates, the first motion was ‘do single sex schools provide a better education?’ and the second was ‘vocational and social education should be just as important as academic qualifications’. All the teams gave excellent rebuttals and worked well to prepare speeches of 2.5 minutes in length.

The judges were Tim Loughton MP, Sir Peter Bottomely MP, West Sussex High Sheriff Caroline Nicholls and Worthing Youth Mayor Josh Davies. They marked every school performance throughout the debates and Tim Loughton MP and Sir Peter Bottomely MP gave opposing views on the motion that the voting age should be lowered to 16.

All teams were amazing and did extremely well, especially in the floor debate and after four debates, we were awarded third place. Although we did not win, it was a great experience and was greatly enjoyable. We met 75% of the success criteria and received certificates.

Next week, the year 9s will be having a subject enrichment session on Climate Change and the year 8s will be partaking in EXAC’s first ever Music enrichment session: subject specialist Mr Dean will be delivering a presentation on the subject of ‘Musicology.’