posted 28th September 2025
How do you ensure students keep turning up at debating club week after week?
Amidst the early morning mists, bright sunshine and new starts of September, the room may be overflowing. As winter sets in, however, the competing demands of coursework deadlines, music rehearsals, sports practices and a general sense of exhaustion can deplete your ranks. How do you keep students committed and engaged?
In my experience, much the best way is to set up and run an internal competition. Students are highly motivated by competition; they want to win, and they don’t want to let their teammates down. It gives a focus and a purpose to debates. And it coincides very naturally with coaching - detailed and specific feedback to students after each debate is the single best way to improve performance, and will be listened to more attentively when they have their eyes on a prize.
Below is a guide to the practicalities of setting up and running an internal competition.
1. Choose your format
My recommendation is to use Extended Mace for Y5-8, and to progress to British Parliamentary (BP) for Y9-13. The formality, gentler pace, and opportunity for audience involvement of Extended Mace makes it suitable for younger students as they build up their confidence. Older students will appreciate the greater sophistication and the vigorous cut and thrust of BP.
2. Pick your teams
Rule number one: don’t let them choose. Be very clear about this from the start.
Your objective (which you can share with students) is to ensure that teams are well balanced and complementary, and are as evenly matched as possible. So if you have a charming, confident girl who has a wonderful speaking style but can’t be bothered to do much preparation, match her with a diligent, shy boy whose speeches are quietly delivered but impeccably researched and forensically organised. If you have a handful of stars, make sure they are evenly distributed amongst the teams.
Better not, though, to go into your selection rationale in too much detail (‘Catherine’s really lazy so I’ve put her with Ibrahim because he’ll do all the work …’); just announce the teams as a fait accompli, without any further discussion. Make clear that these teams will remain the same for at least a term.
Most teachers regularly plan pair work, group work and seating plans according to these principles. Use the same techniques in debating club.
3. Set up the structure
I recommend a leaderboard structure. This will ensure that each team has the same number of debates, and all teams have skin in the game until the last fixture of the season.
A leaderboard works like this.
Teams are awarded marks by the judge (normally the teacher running the debating club - see below for more on how to judge and mark a debate).
In Extended Mace, which involves just two teams, the team with the higher number of marks wins the debate. If both teams have the same number of marks, the debate is drawn. In BP, which involves four teams, teams are ranked first to fourth. There can be a tie between different rankings if teams are awarded the same marks.
For Extended Mace, award two points for a win, one for a draw, none for a loss. For BP, award four points for first place, three for second, two for third and one for fourth place. If teams draw for a position, split the points, so e.g. if there is a tie between the top two teams, award 3.5 points to each team.
Rank teams week by week first by total points across the competition, and then by total speaker marks across the competition. You can set this up on a simple spreadsheet - Excel or Google Sheets - and use the ‘sort data’ function to rank them accurately.
Share this spreadsheet with the club via whichever platform you use in your school. If you have allocated your teams equitably, there should be plenty of ebb and flow as teams move up and down week by week. Ideally, it will all come down to the last debate of the season …
How long should your season be? I recommend starting a new leaderboard each term. This allows you to reset the teams, and to accommodate current students dropping out / new students joining.
4. Set up your fixture list
The number one goal of a fixture list is to ensure that all teams have an equal number of debates. However, Extended Mace and BP require different approaches.
Extended Mace
Extended Mace is easier to organise as there are only two teams in each debate. In an ideal world, each team should debate against each other team once. This may not be possible if you have a large number of students in the club; in this case, make sure that each team has the same number of debates. Also make sure that teams alternate between being proposition and opposition over the whole fixture list.
There is an easy formula to work out how many debates you need to ensure each team debates against each other team once. Add up all the numbers leading up to the number of teams you have. So if you have four teams, you need 3 + 2 + 1 = 6 debates; for five teams it’s 4 + 3 + 2 +1 = 10. And so on. If you have a small number of teams, it may be possible for teams to debate against each other more than once. In this case, make sure they swap positions in the second debate, so if team A was proposition and team B was opposition in the first debate, B is proposition and A is opposition in the second debate.
Once you have done all this mathematical juggling, pick your motions. Start with easier ones (co-educational schools, school uniform and homework are the traditional openers, as being well within students’ personal experience) and make them progressively more challenging. Allocate motions and teams to dates. Check all dates against the school calendar for clashes with open evenings / school trips etc. which mean you cannot run the club. Type it all up, check it carefully to make sure it fits all the formulae above, then check it again, then get someone else to check it. Then issue it to students and tell them to swap contact details with their teammates and get preparing.
It takes a long time to set up a fixture list, but once done, life gets easier; just turn up to the club and chair and judge that week’s debate. However, I do recommend sending out weekly reminders of the next debate.
BP
BP is both more complicated and simpler.
The more complicated part: as well as ensuring that teams have an equal number of debates, you also need to give teams an equal number of turns in each of the four positions - opening government, opening opposition, closing government, closing opposition.
The simple part: unlike Extended Mace, BP is traditionally ‘short prep’, so it is less appropriate to announce motions in advance. This means you can be a bit more flexible.
If you have a full hour for the club, you can announce the motion and allocate positions on the day, giving students 15 minutes to prepare, leaving 40 minutes (8 x 5 minute speeches) for the debate, and 5 minutes for your judgement and feedback. If you only have 45 minutes, you will need to announce the motion and allocate positions at least a week in advance to give students time to prepare.
However, I would still recommend not announcing topics any further in advance than you have to. This allows you to respond flexibly to the latest issues in the news and current affairs, encouraging students to take an intelligent interest in politics. Students in the Y9-13 age range will be starting to form their own political opinions and will respond well to this level of challenge.
The difficulty with this approach is ensuring equal number of debates and positions. Keep a spreadsheet or checklist and update it after each debate to ensure you are doing this.
5. Dealing with absences
Even with the most dedicated and committed cohort, there will inevitably be some absences because of illness or other legitimate reason. The key thing is never to cancel or reschedule; explain this policy to students at the start of term, and stick to it.
If a student is absent, their teammate should ‘iron person’, that is, do more than one speech. You may also allow other students to step in at the last moment. Maintaining this firm approach will encourage students to turn up regularly for fear of letting their friends down.
6. How to judge and mark a debate
There is not at present a uniform mark scheme used across all competitions. However, I have devised my own mark schemes for both Extended Mace and BP. These are modelled on the mark schemes used for GCSEs and A-Levels in humanities subjects such as English and History, and are designed to be both teacher-friendly and transparent and easy to understand for students. I use them for all my clubs and all my competitions, and recommend them to you. I have also recorded sample debates on video with marks and comments, equivalent to the sample answers used to train GCSE and A-Level markers.
Both the mark schemes and the sample debate videos, along with advice for judges, can be accessed in the documents below.
Extended Mace markscheme and video of sample debate
BP markscheme and video of sample debate
This post gives further advice on how to judge a debate.
7. Begin with the end in mind
Any competition needs a reward for the winners. Here are some different ways to reward the victorious teams.
- Have certificates printed for first, second, third place, with the school logo and, ideally, some kind of debating logo. Having these proudly displayed on kitchen walls will bring joy and pride to your students, and will raise the profile of your club. If your budget runs to a trophy in addition to certificates, even better. Have certificates and / or trophy presented by the headteacher / head of section in assembly.
- If your school has a house system, organise the competition on a house basis. This allows you to access both the structures and the kudos associated with interhouse competitions.
- Set up a grand final between the top two teams (or top four teams in BP) on the leaderboard. If you can, negotiate for all KS2 / KS3 / KS4 / KS5 students to be taken off timetable to watch it in the school hall.
- If you are entering teams for external competitions, use the leaderboard for team selection. As well as providing a tangible reward for successful teams, this also gives you an objective rationale for team selection - thereby avoiding awkward conversations with parents of students who have not been picked.
Running an internal competition requires quite a lot of admin, but it is well worth it. You will undoubtedly see an increase in commitment from students, as well as substantial progress with their debating skills.
