This year Faringdon Community College (FCC) hosted the opening local heat of RIBI Youth Speaks Competition on Thursday 24th November.


There was unprecedented enthusiasm from FCC who entered seven teams in all – three senior for 14-17 year olds and four intermediate for 11-13 years while King Alfred had two senior and two junior teams.


Bjorn Watson ably assisted by Paul Rogers, Tim Cowling and Glyn James organised the competition on behalf of Faringdon Rotary and Charlotte Kitching, an inspirational teacher at FCC, took on the tutelage of their


teams.


Charlotte did a grand job of putting together, assisting and motivating the teams. It was the usual format with each team consisting of a chairman, speaker and someone to give the Vote of Thanks.


The presentations and the way they were expressed were a real eye-opener. We oldies can learn so much from the young people and their powerful opinions. We learnt, for instance, that Mindfulness was being in the moment and that Donald Trump would rape his daughter if they were not related and of course: do I really want it; can I afford it or is it just clever marketing? But the star was undoubtedly Hannah Hayward from KAA who started her speech in Spanish and went on to shame us all by pointedly expounding on how lazy we Brits are linguistically and how much we are the losers for it. However for me the real hero was Zak Read who battled on with his speech on racism while afflicted by desperate nerves. Well done Hannah and Zak and all those who spoke so well! Let no-one say kids today are going to the dogs!


The chairman of the judges Peter Saunders summed up the presentations explaining that they had a very difficult job in deciding on the winning teams. He pointed out the importance of speaking slowly and clearly from notes consisting of bullet points without reading from a script. Making eye contact with members of the audience is also important and, of course, the ……. pause!


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