Winning Public Speaking Team

Public Speaking Winners

On Thursday night, our Year 11 team of Daisy, Sara and Ailsa took part in the SW regional final of the ESU public speaking competition, after their successful outing in the last round before half term. This was essentially a national semi-final, as the next stop is the national final. This is the second consecutive year that this Ryde School team has reached this advanced stage of the competition, although last year, the pandemic unfortunately prevented it from going ahead. 

Although the last round was just last month, today the girls had to deliver new speeches, and Daisy had a totally different topic: The most important thing in communication is hearing what is not said (Peter Drucker). All of them performed excellently and truly stood out, even though the overall standard of the final was genuinely very high.

We are delighted to say that they finished in second place as the runners-up today, finishing ahead of 6 other schools, including Bishop Wordsworth, South Wilts Grammar School and Badminton School. Although the Ryde team does not automatically go through to the national final with the winning team, they are the reserve team, and so could yet take part - we will have to see what happens. Either way, our speakers did the School, and themselves, extremely proud.