By Lauren Woodham, year 12, Keswick School
This year, Keswick School took part in The Ethics Cup competition, which was organised by St Andrew’s University.
This tournament allows schools to come together and debate different topics, aiming to foster more positive debating skills of insightfulness, collaboration and reflection.
On 11 March, 10 students from Keswick School (including myself) accompanied by two teachers went to Glasgow University to take part in the regionals of the competition.
As a school, we have never entered this competition before so no one knew what to expect. There were a total of 11 cases that might come up, such as ‘universal basic income vs means tested income’ and ‘banning short domestic flights’.
For the debate, two schools were paired up, team A and team B with team A presenting first.
We were given the case sets (we didn’t know which cases would come up before the day) and we had a few minutes to collect our thoughts before presenting our argument.
After giving our argument, the other team would have the opportunity to comment on our presentation and ask us questions. Once we responded to these, we were also put on the spot by the judges for 10 minutes.
There were two qualifying stages, so we split into two teams of five to share out the workload. After winning both of these matches, we advanced to the semi-final. This was further than we’d expected to get, but we were so grateful for getting through the qualifying stage!
For the semi-final, we made a composite team out of our two teams of five, to give some people a break and also to give ourselves the best chance of going through to the final. After an apprehensive wait, the judges announced that we had won the semi-final!
We were all so excited to advance to the final. This was by far the most nerve wracking match, as the philosophy professors asked even harder questions. But we won the final as well!
Having won the regionals, we have qualified (along with two other schools, who placed second and third) for the finals of The Ethics Cup in St Andrew’s University! As a team, we’d like to thank Mrs Thomas and Mr Winter, who made this all possible.
