Debating

Junior Speaking Program 

This year, in the brightly lit, familiarly plastic-chaired classrooms of Coburg High School, the members of the NHS Debating Club in year 7 have been participating in the Junior Speaking Program (JSP), run by the Debating Association of Victoria (DAV), an inter-school debating event. This was the final round of the debates this year. The topic was ‘that it should be compulsory for online retailers to have physical stores,’ and our school was the affirmative team. It was the first outside of school debate for two of the three team members speaking that evening, although everyone had come to watch the previous rounds and was anticipating the anxious-excited buzz that came with this one. 

Our first speaker was Arul, who blew away the audience, other students, and Robert the adjudicator, (an adjudicator is an experienced debater who decides who won the debate and what the scores were) with his creative definition of the topic. He then followed this with equally good arguments. As we were all excited (and not surprised) to discover, Arul won ‘best speaker’ from the adjudicator.  

Second to speak on our team was Sophie, who was also incredible. She, as a second speaker, did an excellent job of presenting powerful arguments with great structure. Sophie successfully added some impressive rebuttals that she had mostly only thought of seconds beforehand, bringing the classroom to life. 

I was the third speaker for our school's team. It was my job to rebut the other team's arguments and summarise Sophie, Arul, and my arguments. I spoke about the arguments that both my team and the other team had presented, as well as presenting some more and giving reasons against what the other team had said.  

Tessa, Uma, Charlie, and Oscar, some of our other team members, came to watch. Although they had already spoken on other nights instead, they drew and wrote encouraging signs to cheer us on with, created a new mascot and were consistently giving everyone all the support they needed and more throughout this debate. They helped to do research, think of arguments, rebuttals and added to the summary, team split and definition. Nobody could have done it without them. 

Everyone was resilient and persevering, and we won the debate by 6 points, with our team on 276 points and the opposing team on 270 points (it might not seem like much unless you have done a debate with scoring before – it is always quite close). In the end, as Oscar said, it was a ‘clean win.’ I would like to thank Ms. Balis, Mr. Tucker, and everyone in my team – Sophie, Uma, Adele, Oscar, Tessa, Arul, and Charlie -- for making all the rounds of year 7 debating worthwhile. We are all proud to have spoken at JSP this year and look forward to doing more in 2025 too. 

~ Nelleke Mathews