Every year, students in Year 8 take part in the Speak Up Competition: a public speaking competition in which participants aim to convince their audience of their point of view on a particular topic. We spoke to a couple of the winners of this year’s competition to find out what they presented on and why.
From Saralynn:
‘Hello! My name is Saralynn, and I was one of the winners in the annual Year 8 public speaking competition, known as the Speak Up competition.
In this, we wrote a speech about a topic of our choice, aiming to convince the audience of our point of view. My speech was ‘Why Twitter is Terrible’. I chose this topic after a super stressful five minutes in which I ran through a million different ones in my head, eventually deciding on it because there were some points which I felt were very important to make. I also decided to choose this topic for my speech because Twitter is such a large platform, but many of the people I spoke to about did not know, or did not have much detailed knowledge, about the points I mentioned, which made me even more determined to share the public but relatively unknown knowledge I found.
There were three main points I focused on, which were abuse of power, poor responses to said abuse of power, and the lack of enforcement of pedophilia policies. I found these topics extremely interesting, albeit very depressing at times, to research.
Despite the quite sensitive and dismal information and points that I was looking at, I very much enjoyed working on the speech, and look forward to doing more things like it in the future!’
From Zahra
‘My speech was all about persuading people to decolonise the curriculum. This means that people should be taught about all cultures and races at school. Currently, pupils are not taught about Black Ethnic Minority people in any subject enough. For example, many people know who Napoleon was, but not many people know who Toussaint Louverture was.
I chose this topic because it underpins one of the main reasons why racism is still so apparent today. The Eurocentric teaching in the national curriculum gives Black Ethnic Minority people a huge disadvantage. It makes these people feel excluded in society because their ancestors and cultures are not recognised, even though they might have had some incredible achievements. This makes non-Europeans feel disconnected from the educational system, often leading to them having worse results than their peers and perhaps even dropping out of school. This also creates a prejudice that can make people of Ethnic Majority feel superior to Black Ethnic minority people, sometimes driving them to feel as though they can discriminate and even start racial attacks! It is key that we address this issue to start combatting hate and violence between different cultures and gain racial equality for all.’