Content for Speech

Madam Chair, members of the council, fellow students — thank you for these few minutes.

Let me start with a question. How many of you have ever sprinted from a classroom to the canteen, bolted a sandwich in ninety seconds, and called that "lunch"? Look around. Almost every hand could go up. We are not asking for a luxury today. We are asking for the time to breathe — and I believe, by the end of these minutes, you will agree.

Think of what a library truly is. It is not shelves and silence; it is the one door in this town that opens to everyone — to the child who has no quiet corner at home, to the jobseeker printing a CV, to the pensioner who simply wants company and a warm seat. We cannot call ourselves a community while that door stays shut. We cannot say we value our children and then deny them the very place that built half the minds in this room. If a library is too expensive, then ask yourself: what, exactly, is ignorance worth?

Headteacher, deputy heads, members of the leadership team — thank you for hearing me.

I have read the case for a ban, and I will not pretend it is groundless. Text D is right that phones can distract, right that some of us lose sleep to a glowing screen, right that teachers should not spend their lessons policing pockets. I grant all of it. But I ask you this: when a tool can be misused, do we ban the tool — or do we teach the hand that holds it?

Consider what the article quietly forgets. The same phone that distracts is the phone that translates a word for a pupil new to English. It is the phone that calls a parent in an emergency, that captures a diagram from the board, that lets a nervous student message the safeguarding line when speaking aloud feels impossible.

Yes, cyberbullying is real — but a ban does not delete it; it simply pushes it to the bus, the bedroom, the unwatched hours. Teach us to use these devices well, and you do not lose a lesson. You gain a generation that knows how.

So I do not ask you to ignore the dangers. I ask you to answer them better than a ban can. Trust us with rules, not a wall. Teach us, do not just forbid us. The future will hold a screen in its hand — let us be the school that taught it how to look up from it.

Thank you.

Councillors, residents, friends — thank you for letting a young person speak tonight.

I have read your report. I know the numbers. Forty thousand pounds — that is the figure beside our youth centre, and I do not pretend it is small. But numbers are not the whole truth, and I am here to tell you the rest of it.

You call the building "old and underused." Underused — on a weekday morning, perhaps, when every one of us is sitting in a classroom across town. But come at four o'clock. Come on a Friday night. The music room is full. The clubs are full. The counselling drop-in — the only one for miles — has a waiting list. That is not an empty building. That is the one place some of us are heard.

A councillor says we "can use the library instead." With respect — can the library hold a band rehearsal? Can it sit beside a frightened fourteen-year-old who has nowhere else to talk? A library lends books. Our centre lends belonging. They are not the same, and you know it.

So weigh it honestly. Forty thousand pounds a year against the cost of a generation with nowhere to go — nowhere to play, nowhere to talk, nowhere to be young in safety.

I am not asking you to ignore the budget. I am asking you to find the saving somewhere that does not have a heartbeat. Keep the lights on. Keep the door open. Keep faith with the young people who are watching, tonight, to see what you truly value.

Thank you.

Good morning. Teachers, friends, year groups stacked up these benches from the youngest to the oldest — thank you for listening.

We are asked a simple-sounding question this morning: should volunteering be compulsory? And the moment you say it aloud, you hear the problem in it. Compulsory. Generosity. Two words that do not belong in the same sentence.

Now, I will be fair to the other side, because they are not foolish. They tell us volunteering builds empathy, teaches us skills no exam can, and yes — it brightens an application. All true. I have seen a shy friend find her voice reading to children at the care home. I would never deny that volunteering can change a person.

But change a person — that is the point. It changes us when we choose it. The moment a school stamps "compulsory" across an act of kindness, it stops being kindness and becomes homework with a halo. We would not call a forced apology sincere. Why would we call forced charity generous?

And think who pays for this. The student already up at dawn caring for a younger sibling, for a grandmother, for a parent who is unwell — we would hand her a form and ask her to "start volunteering," as if she has not been doing it all her life, unthanked. We would steal the rest of the exhausted and call it virtue.

So here is what I ask. Do not command us to be good. Inspire us. Open the doors, show us the need, make giving so easy and so welcome that we run towards it — and watch how many of us choose to go.

Real generosity cannot be ordered. It can only be invited. Let us be the school that invites.

Thank you.

Q1(a) — Analysis (5 marks)

The writer persuades chiefly through metaphor and emotive personification. Calling the high street "the beating heart of who we are" frames the town as a living body and the shops as the organ keeping it alive, so closure is made to feel like a wound, not a budget decision. The contrast "by name, not by number" sets warm human connection against cold anonymity, flattering local shops while damning the alternative. Most powerful is the closing image, "a car park where its soul used to be": the abstract noun "soul" gives the town a spiritual value, and the bleak picture of a car park lets the reader feel the loss before they reason about it. Throughout, the inclusive "who we are" binds writer and reader into a single threatened community.

Q1(b) — Speech (35 marks)

Councillors, neighbours, friends — thank you for opening this meeting to the people whose town this actually is.

I have read the plans for the retail park, and I understand their appeal. Jobs. Parking. Bright new units under one roof. I will not insult you by pretending those things do not matter. But I ask you to weigh what we would buy against what we would bury.

Walk our high street tomorrow morning. The baker knows your order. The chemist asks after your mother. We are known here, as the paper said, "by name, not by number" — and you cannot build that, however large the car park. A retail park gives us lights we drive to and drive from. The high street gives us somewhere we belong.

I know what we will be told: that the shops are old, that the future is bigger and faster and elsewhere. But a town is not a transaction. Tear out its heart for a car park, and you do not get a richer town — you get a quieter one, a colder one, a town with a car park where its soul used to be.

So I ask one thing of this council tonight. Invest in the heart still beating. Help our shops, do not bulldoze them. Keep the names, keep the welcome, keep the place we belong.

Save our high street. Save ourselves.

Thank you.