What is an individual judge?
Each Debating Matters Championship has a team of panel judges, who judge the particular debate they are allocated to. In addition, there is a team of individual judges. If you would like to be an individual judge, you don’t need any experience for this role, just a willingness to support teenage debaters in their endeavours to become better debaters.
Individual judges play an incredibly important role at our Championships. Debating Matters places significant importance on the students’ engagement with the ideas contained in the debate. Our motto is substance over style! Therefore, we allocate a fair amount of time during each debate to audience questions which students – who are not on the panel but have come to support their colleagues – take part. Because of this element of the competition, we award individual prizes as well as the awards for the winning team and runners-up. As an individual judge, you will be part of the team that awards accolades at the end of the day.
Prize awards
Three prizes, awarded to three individuals and decided collectively by the team of individual judges.
- Best individual
- Highly commended individual
- Commended individual
You will be looking out for the single student who impresses you the most throughout the day for their consistent engagement with ideas and their ability to think beyond simply boosting their team’s chances or showing off! Someone who shows a genuine interest in, and engagement with, all of the debates at hand and has clearly done their research.
Honourable mentions
Each individual judge will decide who they give their one honourable mention to, an opportunity to recognise a student who impressed them but didn’t quite make ‘Best individual’. This might be someone who made a particularly good single contribution, an especially pertinent or interesting point, or someone who was enthusiastic throughout the day and contributed to the discussions.
The best individual, highly commended and commended awards, as well as your honourable mention, can be awarded to any student at the event, whether they speak on a panel OR from the audience. On occasion, we have guest schools who are not taking part in the formal competition, but students from these schools are also eligible for individual awards. Please award your prizes to the genuinely best contributors, rather than seeing them as a consolation prize for those who don’t do so well!
Outline of the day
Ideally, you will attend the whole day and see as many debates as you can. They will normally be allocated to you so that we have an even spread across the debates. You will need to keep notes throughout the day and keep track of the students you are impressed by.
All students will be asked by the debate chair to state their name and school when they speak. If they mumble, or you don’t quite catch their name, you can find an appropriate moment to ask them again (try not to interrupt them while making their point as this can put students off). You can also ask a member of the Debating Matters team to help you identify them. Feel free to talk to, and consult, your fellow individual judges throughout the day.
A member of the Debating Matters team will act as the chair of individual judges and will ensure that you all meet up during the day to discuss your findings, swap notes and give each other pointers on students to look out for. They will also coordinate the discussion at the end of the day when you make your decisions and record the results. If there is time, and you are willing, you will be asked to announce your honourable mention. However, one of the Debating Matters team will be happy to do this on your behalf.
We really hope you enjoy judging for us – it really is incredibly rewarding, and many of our judges remark that they come away from the events feeling inspired and challenged in equal measure.
If you’d like to know more, we made a short film, Why Debating Matters, which gives you a flavour of the competition.