Discover Your Voice

As the organisers of the ESU Schools Mace, the national debating championship and the founders of the phenomenally successful London Debate Challenge, the ESU is the UK's leading provider of debate training to secondary schools.

Our expertise covers all Key Stages and subject areas, and Discover Your Voice will help you develop both debate within the classroom and as an extra-curricular activity.

Secondary school pupil workshops

Half day: £300 (exc. VAT)
Full day: £400 (exc. VAT)
both options include membership and 5 handbooks.

Discover Your Voice offers schools a wide range of pupil-centred debate training to kick-start the use of persuasive spoken English formats or strengthen an existing debate tradition. Delivered by the ESU’s Debates and Education Officer, supported by our team of trained mentors drawn from skilled university-level debaters, support can be tailored to suit the needs, age range and ability level of your students.

SAMPLE HALF DAY SECONDARY SCHOOL WORKSHOP

10:00: Introduction and warm-up games
10:15: What is a debate?
10:30: What makes a good debating speech / Criteria for assessment and discussion of these
10:45: Reasoning & Evidence (discussion and exercises).
11:00: Listening & Response (discussion and exercises)
11:15: Organisation & prioritisation (discussion and exercises)
11:30: Expression & Delivery (discussion and exercises)
11:45: Break
12:00: Debate preparation and speech writing
12:30: Student presentations / debate
1:00: Close

SAMPLE FULL DAY SECONDARY SCHOOL WORKSHOP

10:00: Introduction and warm-up games or display debate by university debate mentors (see 'Group size' below)
10:30: What makes a good debate speech, incorporating exercises and discussion.
11:30: Break
11:45: Defining and setting up a debate
12:00: Responding and rebuttal
12:30: Lunch
1:00: Preparing for a debate (group exercise)
1:30: Speech writing and preparation for students’ debate.
2:30: Students’ debates.
3:30: Student questions and general discussion.
4:00: Close

Lunchtime or twilight CPD: Any half or full day session also entitles you to a one hour teacher training session, at lunchtime or after school. We can cater for as many colleagues as you like. Explore new classroom techniques and persuasive speech formats, have your questions answered, or receive tailored advice.

Group size: You may want to work with a hand-picked group of students, an existing debating society, or a single class, and our Debates and Education Officer can work with up to 20 students of any age or level of ability in one session.

However, many schools and most LAs wish to work with much larger numbers of students in their sessions. We can support large groups by bringing with us trained university debate mentors (where available). They help the students when working in groups and give live demonstratrations of some of the more unfamiliar concepts involved in our special extended speaking formats. If you want to work with more than 20 pupils, we will bring at least one mentor, and keep on adding mentors for each group – or part group – of 15 students. Additional mentors: £100 each.

Dartmouth House

The headquarters of the English-Speaking Union are in Dartmouth House, an impressive 19th century mansion in Mayfair, central London.
If you would like to use this building as a venue for your workshop, CPD day or competition (subject to availability and capacity) we can arrange that for you with the building’s contract caterers, Leith’s. Any event held at Dartmouth House is subject to a 100% surcharge.

Widening participation - and saving you money!

We want Discover Your Voice to bring debating to as many schools as possible, and to encourage the growth of inter-school debating activities.

For every extra school you include in your pupil workshop or CPD day we’ll offer you a discount of 5% off the price of your session, up to a maximum of 25% off.

So bring pupils or teachers from five schools as well as your own and you could save a quarter, and benefit from dividing the remaining costs between the participating schools.

This offer applies to individual schools only, not to local authority or similar bookers.

Contact us at mail@discoveryourvoice.co.uk or on 020 7529 1550 for more information or to make a booking.