June and July had been busy months for us working to bring Debating Matters 2007-08 to a successful conclusion and recruiting 50 per cent more schools than ever before for next year’s debates in the UK.

Debating Matters is a schools debating competition run for 16-19 year olds in the UK by a team at the Institute of Ideas. We piloted the competition five years ago with 32 schools and now involve 192 from across the country. A central objective of the project was to develop a debating format that emphasised the importance of content and intellectual rigour above a simple reliance on oratorical flourish.

Our success in engaging British youth in indepth discussion of key social issues caught the attention of Sujata Sen, Director of British Council East India, who then approached us about the possibility of working together on an exciting joint project and invited us to visit India to set it up.

At our UK National Final a few weeks earlier we had run a session on debate in India and all the British students were excited about the prospect of Debating Matters going international and the possibility of debating with Indian students in the future. Sujata had attended the UK Final as a judge and expressed her commitment to trialling the competition in India. That commitment, coupled with the enthusiastic support of Pfizer, the competition’s headline sponsor, meant that our trip to India was not a speculative one to decide whether to go ahead with the project but a planning expedition to get everything in place for an ambitious series of debates in Kolkata, Chennai, Mumbai and Delhi to run during the first two weeks of January 2009.

What we were yet to find out was how much bigger this pilot would quickly become. From afar, as we studied maps of India, read about the mind-boggling number of schools and mugged up on the rudiments of the India education system, the prospect of taking Debating Matters to India seemed a pretty tall order. But that’s where the British Council came in.

We soon realised that whilst everyone wanted to respect the core Debating Matters ethos, interpreting that in a different country and context, especially one as immense as India, would involve a degree of experimentation and departure from what exactly we do in the UK. The dynamism and go-ahead spirit of staff we met at the British Council was refreshing and encouraged us to be innovative.

Whilst our January 2009 events are only a limited pilot, necessarily involving a relatively small number of schools first time round, the need to invite the several hundred schools that the British Council works with to apply to take part in the pilot became apparent.

An online elimination process was quickly drawn up and additional live elimination rounds were invented. So now Debating Matters India will begin in mid-September not January and we will certainly be watching these experiments with interest in the UK.

One of the most rewarding aspects of our visits was discussing the merits of Debating Matters with the principals and debate masters from nearly twenty different schools. This led to some interesting discussions about the relative importance of substance and style in a debate and, we felt, a genuine interest and desire to engage with Debating Matters and its emphasis on rigour.

The teachers seemed particularly taken with the role that a Debating Matters judge plays in entering into debate and discussion with the students on a given issue and the emphasis on putting students under strong intellectual pressure to develop their arguments further anddemonstrate a deeper appreciation of the issues at stake. Our commitment to providing all schools with our educational resource packs – Topic Guides – providing background readings and anentry point to each debate also seemed popular.

Overall, the level of commitment and seriousness of the teachers towards education and the development of their students stood out and this was reinforced at several school site visits. Another very interesting encounter of the trip was a meeting with an Indian TV production company who are responsible for many successful programmes, both high-brow documentaries and reality TV shows. It was interesting to note that the trappings of this Indian creative company – table football games and ping pong – were very in keeping with their counterparts in the UK. A serious discussion about the prospects for developing a TV version of Debating Matters ensued and again we are looking forward to seeing what happens.

Visiting India there was a lot for us to take in – the sights and sounds, the differences and similarities, and the issues of public debate. Many of the discussions we had with people or read in the newspapers dealt with familiar themes – terrorism, free speech, obesity, the purpose of education, and the role of the media – but the context in which those debates are taking place in India is distinct. Getting to grips with that context and being able to debate the issues in a more nuanced and intelligent way will be a fascinating challenge very much in the spirit of Debating Matters and the work of the Institute of Ideas more generally.

We, and our colleagues who will be joining the debates in India in January, are certainly looking forward to that cultural dialogue and fermenting some lively, well researched and well argued debates.