KEY FACTS
- What: Two- or three-term debating programme
- Age: Years 5 & 6
- Price: Heavily subsidised
- When: September-July (three-term) or January-July (two-term)
- Delivery: Mentor support, teacher training and comprehensive lesson plans
IN BRIEF
Discover Debating is an innovative, long-term debating programme. It creates a sustainable culture of debating in your school and supports oracy across the curriculum.
Based on fun, engaging games and activities, Discover Debating includes all necessary lesson plans, up to one full term of mentor-led support, and professional development training for three teachers at your school. It also includes a unique assessment sheet to map student development in the core skills of reasoning and evidence, listening and response, organisation and prioritisation, and expression and delivery. In the first year of the programme, pupils’ average scores across these four skill sets improved by nearly 60 per cent.
Discover Debating has taught me to respect other people’s opinions and to solve arguments without a lot of drama and problems
Shiphrah
Discover Debating participant
Why do it - student benefits
- Delivers demonstrable improvement in critical thinking and oracy skills
- Augments writing skills. Discover Debating gives students experience of producing balanced arguments, a key requirement for KS2 writing
- Improves English comprehension and provides practice in backing up arguments with examples, a key focus for SATS performance
- Promotes spiritual, moral, social and cultural (SMSC) education
- Boosts confidence, teamwork and clarity of thought
Why do it - teacher benefits
- Meets 80% of English national curriculum targets in spoken language and reading and writing comprehension and 100% of oracy requirements in Welsh national curriculum
- Helps meet national curriculum targets for citizenship teaching in Key Stage 2
- Reusable resources with long lifespan. Discover Debating is designed to be self-sustaining, so schools can continue the programme alone after the initial year
- Unique assessment sheet to map student development
- Encourages full-class participation
- Transferable lesson plans to encourage oracy and debate across the curriculum
- Chance to observe someone else teaching your class and how your students learn
- Supportive, highly trained mentors
1,770
...the number of children that increased their oracy skills and confidence through Discover Debating in 2017/18
‘A lot of our pupils are EAL (English as an additional language) pupils, and debating helps to give their language skills an extra boost – it gets them talking and improves their confidence. I’ve really seen the change in the children I’ve worked with. The oracy skills and techniques we’ve learnt can be applied in maths, in persuasive writing and are useful all round. Children who have benefited from oracy training have a better structure to express themselves and explain their answers. Teaching our children that they don’t all have to feel or think the same, that someone can have a different opinion and you can agree to disagree – that’s so important.’
Liezel Jacobs, Teacher, Broadwater Primary School, Tooting
Find out more
Questions?
If you have any questions or queries about Discover Debating please email debating@esu.org or call 020 7529 1583.
