Challenging Day!

7th February 2012

The first of three planned challenge days took place this week. These days have been designed to cover aspects of the personal, social and health education (PSHE), enterprise and citizenship curriculum with interesting and challenging activities, delivered in their form classes.

This week’s challenge focussed on debating and politics, with pupils competing against each other in teams, with the winning team getting to spend the day at a top London business.

Whilst an extremely fun day, the pupils explored some serious messages and so gained an understanding of the importance of democracy serving society as a whole, as opposed  to pursuing self interest. Through debate they could see that shouting loudly as an individual was less effective than getting their message across in a well formed group.

After an initial team building exercise, where pupils built their own Parliament tower, they were introduced to what a debate is, before drawing up suitable rules and preparing their own arguments for a debate about social media.

Pupils also learnt about democracy through various team games, as well as finding out about the UK’s political system and 3 main parties, before forming their own party.

Pupils came up with some imaginative ideas for what their parties stood for, with environmental issues and health care amongst the most popular issues raised. Finally pupils demonstrated democracy with each party presenting its ideas and “electing” a winning party.

Following the success and positive feedback from the day a further two ‘challenge’ days are planned in this academic year.