A Zany Day at the National Eco-Schools Debate Challenge

On 7 November, our Eco-Schools co-ordinator, Miss Crowther, and five Year 10 girls took a trip to London’s Westfield Centre to take part in the first ever National Eco-Schools Debate Challenge, held at KidZania.

The day consisted of travelling down very early (setting off at 6.30am) to London and taking part in four hard-fought debates. The issues were tough ones, namely: Fairtrade is a successful social movement: Demand for water resources is rising globally, however supply is unreliable; this will lead to conflict: Deforestation has only negative impacts, and finally: Energy security is more important than food security.

The girls, Imogen, Anubhuti, Anna, Catherine and Niamh, had all shown themselves to be confident speakers and displayed a keen interest in the Sciences and Geography, especially in the areas they had to debate. They debated against other teams from different schools (12 schools in total) and marks were awarded for quality of argument, use of time, contributions from all team members and relevance of the points they made. The girls did all the work themselves and researched each topic in detail completely independently.

Anubhuti said: 'Getting a chance to debate against students from other schools was a great opportunity. I enjoyed the experience and I think my peers and I did well in the competition and backed up our arguments. We all tried our best and we all made some fun memories.'

Miss Crowther agreed: ‘They were amazing and had such a great time! They worked really well as a team and I was very proud of them,' she said.

For more than 20 years, Eco-Schools has been empowering children to raise environmental awareness and drive change, improving the school environment. Sheffield Girls’ are very proud to be one of few schools in the country to have be awarded the Eco-Schools ‘Green Flag’ status three times in a row.