2025 Senior School Training Day

The USU is excited to welcome Senior students to campus for a fun day of competition!

Held on Friday 20th June

Registration closes Thursday 12th June

The day will be divided into three sessions of debates. All schools should arrive at 8:45am in preparation for the start of the first session at 9am. We understand the importance of running schools’ days to time given the travel requirements of many schools attending.

The three sessions will be as follows:

Debate 1: 9:00 am to 10:30am

Debate 2: 11:00am to 12:30pm

Debate 3: 1pm to 2:30pm

In all three sessions, students will debate against teams from other schools. We will provide all teams with their topics and sides (i.e. affirmative or negative) in the main briefing room, half an hour before their debates are scheduled to start. Although many students may not be used to a half-hour preparation, learning to produce a debating case in a shorter period of time is very useful practice. Shortened preparation also allows us to include more debates in the day which definitely benefits students.

Speeches will be 6-8 minutes with one bell at 6 minutes respectively, and a continuous bell at 8 minutes and 15 seconds.

There will be time left over at the end of each debate for feedback from the adjudicator. This advice from highly-experienced university debaters should prove very helpful in improving all speakers.

Feedback will focus on:

• The structure and content of individual speeches
• How each team could improve their case construction and team-work for future debates
• Developing confidence in speakers by emphasising their strengths.
• Using language, timing and tone to emphasise arguments and speak more persuasively.

Each school may register up to 3 teams, if there are more spaces available teams on the waitlist will be offered space on Monday 9th June
If you would like to register more teams please email [email protected] to be put on the waitlist.

Teams consist of up to 4 speakers who may rotate speaking on the day.

✨EQUITY TICKETS✨ If your school would like to apply for equity tickets to register a team, please email Maddie at [email protected] with a short description on why an equity registration would benefit your school/students.