Speech success for Perse student in debating competition
Djia Sanath-Vijay (Year 9) earned plaudits for his eloquence in the national qualifiers of the International Competition for Young Debaters.
He came third overall in the individual speaker rankings out of around 70 participants in the online national round.
However, Djia and team-mate Ruairi Wallace (Year 9) narrowly missed out on making it through to the international final despite a strong performance from the pair arguing across three topics.
These included the implementation of a political general knowledge test to decide who could vote, whether there should be schools specifically for LGBTQ+ students, and if hacking should be allowed for social protest.
Djia said: “Over the three topics, you do three speeches and each individual speech is judged. The better your speech, the more speaker points you get and then they are totalled up to get the overall score.
“I’m happy that my hard work paid off in that aspect. We’d have loved to have gone through to the international final, but sometimes you get a tough topic and there were so many good teams taking part.
“Ruairi and I worked well as a team and we had really good fun competing with people from different schools around the country.”
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