This House Believes

On Thursdays at lunchtime I run a debating club for the Year 6 (10 - 11 year old) children at the local Primary School. Last week there was much excitement as the result of a parcel I had received from the school office. It was a gavel, sent by Peter Blair, the Master in Charge of debating at Haileybury.

Our group has no one in it who has English as a first language. We are truly polyglot - the group of eighteen has over a dozen mother tongues; some of the children from francophone Africa are working in their third language when they debate in English. Even so we don't do badly. I had mentioned to Mr Blair that we had debated the Olympics recently and he said his groups had done the same. Last week the poor Year 6 group was under a bit of pressure as we debated the motion "This House believes there is no point doing mental maths" while their maths teacher was sitting in a corner of the class room marking maths papers. Not even the proposers of the motion dared vote for it - though they did come up with some reasonable arguments.

The gavel is a symbol of how links between institutions and communities can be forged. Although not to debate, groups from Haileybury have come here in the past. Once a confirmation class came to Mass and then went off to lunch with some of our parishioners before a tour of the area and then tea at the Vicarage. It was a great day on all sides. I hope it might be possible for me to take my debating club to a debate at Haileybury. In these days of measuring public benefit and quantifying what good charities do we run the risk of forgetting the mutual support to the education of the young that these small links contribute.