School and Youth Debates (Concern)

• About this resource

  Concern Worldwide regularly hold international forums for student-led debates relating to development issues and the work of Concern. This web page includes resources to support primary and secondary schools that wish to take part in the international forum, but also includes resources that could be adapted to stage a debate in the classroom, with educators and students taking on different roles of chair, timekeeper, etc. 

• Testimonies from educators

  “I do the Concern debates. We’ve been putting debate teams in the Concern debates for years, and two years ago we got to the final and we got to go on a trip into Europe, and we got to visit the European Parliament and the International Criminal Court. We met with people to do with five or six different charities around Europe. Climate change and social justice issues come up a lot [in the debate topics]. So they get to do some serious research and serious work around things like that. 

  The Concern team sets the topics, and they send out the topic, and they tell you what side you're on, like. Our last one was on Fair Trade, but we've done ones on climate, China's relationship with Africa, all sorts of different topics. 

  If you're debating something, and it has a moral kind of dilemma to it, it [climate justice] would come up, definitely. I mean, you know, we were talking about Fair Trade. We were talking about climate change, and we were talking about justice for people. So it'd be a pretty core topic in a lot of the debates, regardless of what the topic is, it would come up regularly.” Dublin-based post-primary educator

  
  “Something that I talked about in my interview was children have such a strong sense of justice, and with so many people going hungry, maybe we could have a mock debate about food poverty and what can we do to help that. So, being able to tie discussions on food waste to talking about climate change, and then subsequently climate justice can be a really interesting way of pulling things together and showing the impact of them, and giving power to their voice, and thinking and actions.” Newcastle-based primary educator