Year 8 English 

The power of persuasive writing

Words are powerful and when used well, they can bring about change.  In our Year 8 English classrooms this term, students have been researching and writing persuasive speeches on issues that are important to them. 

To learn about the influence great speech makers can have, we invited writer, speaker, podcast maker, and importantly parent of NHS, Tony Wilson to share his own enthusiasm for speeches to our Year 8s.  Tony is the creator of website Speakcola, an online collection of 2,000 plus speeches.  Tony inspired us with various samples of speeches, great and small, and gave us all the confidence that young people’s words are worth listening to.   

Students have been presenting their speeches in class over the past two weeks and the effort and calibre has been impressive.  We share two standouts here with you:

Extract from 'Put your Pandemic Problems in Perspective' 

Something that irritates me is when our privilege blinds us from seeing the bigger picture, when it makes us think only of ourselves, and when it makes our wants overshadow the needs of others.

What I then thought about was covid, and the whole covid experience that came with it. Today, all I want is to persuade you to put your pandemic experiences into perspective, because although home school, lockdowns, and protests have all become part of these 'Unprecedented Times' and this 'New Normal', we've been in a pretty good position right from the very start. Yet, we still find room to complain about things like remote learning, when so many kids around the world don't have access to education like we do, which brings me to my first point. 

Put your hand up if you're ready for this school day to be over. Yeah, me too, but we are so lucky to be here today, learning. We were even luckier in lockdown when we were still able to learn remotely. 

However, while we had all of our education ready to go and right at our fingertips, more than one third of the world's school aged children didn’t have, don't have and maybe won't ever have the resources available to access online learning. 

~Ravi Sondhu

Read Ravi's speech in full below

Extract from 'Sexism in Sport: This has to change!'

Social media is a big part of people not respecting and treating women athletes the same as men athletes. Taylor Harris. She posted her amazing kick on social media, and it should have been a celebration but instead she got trolled and objectified. This amazing footy player not being respected and viewed as a talented athlete. Every time I see a post celebrating something about women's sport, the majority of the comments are negative compared to when I see a post celebrating men's sport majority of the comments are positive. The other day a Tiktok came on my FYP, and it was this amazing goal by a female soccer player. All the comments were "how is this professional level" "this isn't even that good of a shot I could do this easily" It's like they all don't know how hard it is for female sport to be at the same level as men when women in sport have been discriminated against for decades.  As a teenage girl who sees all this unfriendly behaviour towards women sport, do you really think I would want to make a future out of it?

This is one of the reasons why, by the age of 14, girls are dropping out of sports at twice the rate of boys. And by age 17, more than half of girls – 51% – will have quit sports according to the Women's Sports Foundation. We only see a future full of negativity.

~Indigo Rodger

Read Indigo's speech in full below

Rebekah Keenan Mount

Head of English