Academic Competitions

Public Speaking competitions in the School are relatively new, and in addition to the inter-House competitions, we enter the local Rotary Club competition both at Intermediate (IVth Form) and Senior levels, and also the English-Speaking Union's competition.
 

Junior and Senior Inter-House Competitions

Introduced in 2008, the House Public Speaking Competitions follow the Rotary Club format. Unlike the debating, which pits one House against another, all Houses compete together. Again, unlike the debating, Houses may choose their own topics and in addition to the main speaker must provide a chairman and a proposer of the vote of thanks. This year, 2009-2010, the Junior competition was won by West and the Senior Competition by North.

 

ESU Public Speaking

Primarily an external competition for Vth Formers, this public speaking competition has an interesting twist – the chairman and the questioner come from another school. This means that our questioner and chairman have to think on their feet, as they will be commenting on another school’s performance! This year (2009/2010) our speakers’ topic is about whether or not a gap year for university should be compulsory. The latest post-event report can be viewed on the Current Community/Academic Competitions pages in due course.
 

Rotary (Intermediate and Senior)

The Rotary Club organises a public speaking competition called ‘Youth Speaks’. It comes in two sections – an Intermediate section (IVth Formers) and a Senior section (Vth and VIth Formers). We traditionally do well in the Seniors competition, making it to the district final in the past two years.

Each year we enter the National Youth Parliament video competition run by the Citizenship Foundation – a competition in which we claimed the winning 2008 entry. We also had three individual national winners, who claimed the titles of Best Government Spokesperson, Best Opposition Spokesperson and Best Backbench MP. The competition requires the pupils to produce and film a debate ‘in Parliament’ (our Reading Room), along with a short mock Prime Minister's Questions session. The 2008 topic was ‘a Bill to Combat the Problems of Obesity in 21st Century Britain’. In 2009 we came 12th in the country, but sadly in 2010 the competition stopped running. We hope to enter again in 2011.

Cranleigh has competed in this nationally-organised quiz competition, along with most of the leading schools of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, for nearly 30 years. The master-in-charge since 1980, and also Regional Organiser for the South Central region, is Mr Peter Longshaw. It is over 20 years since Cranleigh won the regional competition, as in recent years Westminster has dominated the group and been National Champions four years in a row.

There are two inter-House competitions: one (in the Michaelmas Term) which reflects the mix of two Juniors and two Seniors required for the inter-school contests, and a Junior competition in the Lent Term which allows two UVth, a year squeezed out by the age restrictions for juniors in the previous term’s competition, to take part. The ten half-hour contests and home inter-school matches are chaired by Mr Alan Smith.