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students taught
5580+
60+
core staff
data as of May 2025
Our Work
We focus on creating the organizational scale necessary for more effective, accessible, and situationally relevant education by uniting global resources, standardizing best practices, and expanding reach — ensuring every student benefits from world-class coaching opportunities, regardless of location or background.
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What to expect
The unique class structure of Youth Debate League is intended to give each student continuity and individualized development. As students progress through increasingly higher levels in YDL, they remain with the same coach, in contrast to traditional programs that frequently switch instructors. Through regular mentoring, coaches are able to gain a thorough understanding of each student's learning preferences, strengths, and difficulties, which enables them to provide more focused feedback and promote quicker progress.
YDL’s curriculum is built on a foundation of tested debate lesson plans and insights from top competitive debaters. Carefully structured to support progressive skill development, our curriculum ensures that every student receives a detailed, comprehensive, and complete understanding of debate.
Youth Debate League offers a unique advantage by providing free access to internal tournaments for students around the world as well as independent events hosted by national teams or universities. These global competitions give debaters the opportunity to test their skills against peers from diverse backgrounds and skill levels, all with minimised financial barriers.
Our unique lesson progression system is designed to keep debaters actively engaged and consistently motivated to improve. Each level builds on the previous class, introducing new skills, challenges, and formats in a structured yet dynamic way.
Class progression
Initial Assessment - This is a self selective process where we work together to find you your best fit.
English Public Speaking- English Public Speaking or EPS is the introductory course for younger students (grades 4-5) or those without an English-speaking background. Our coaches will work from the ground up to teach concepts like grammar, idioms, pronunciation, and sentence structure. Students must already fully understand the alphabet and know how to read, speak, and write basic vocabulary. All classes will be taught in English unless noted otherwise.
Fundamentals of Debate - The Fundamentals class is designed for proficient or nearing proficient English speakers. It focuses on using English to debate and form arguments as well as preparing students to tackling philosophical/metaphorical topics in the future. Students in Fundamentals should feel comfortable with reading and writing, as well as speaking English. All classes will be taught in English unless noted otherwise.
Public Speaking - This class focuses on speaking and understanding English, with a focus on public speaking and presentation. This will encompass rhetorical concepts like tonality, volume, and emphasis. Students in Public Speaking should have mastered sentence structures, most pronunciation, and feel confident in communicating in English. This class transitions well into most school curriculums, helping students with dictations, presentations, and reading.
Intermediate Debate -Intermediate Debate is a transition towards the primary debate program. In this class, students will learn to organize speeches, prioritize arguments, and respond to others. Coaches will also teach concepts such as critical thinking and cognitive flexibility throughout to guide the learning process. Intermediate is also where debate formats such as World Schools or British Parliamentary are taught. Students in Intermediate should have completed Fundamentals or have some debate/public speaking training.
Advanced Debate - This introductory course into competitive debating is an intensive dive into debating formats, time allocations, speakers roles, and other higher-level concepts. The course spans more weeks than previous classes and each class is lengthened to give coaches more time to explain ideas and create challenging debate scenarios. Students must have debate experience or substantial public speaking experience to participate fully in Advanced.
Competitive Debate - The final level of YDL's class progression is a highly engaging debate environment where students frequently engage in practice debates, drills, and gain experience forming arguments quickly and effectively. At this level, coaches are rarely teaching new concepts, but offering feedback, critiques, and guidance for debaters. Students should have completed Advanced Debate beforehand, or received some debate coaching externally.
Coaching Development - We hope that all of our students remain in the YDL community, and to those passionate to continue, there are opportunities to become coaches. Our senior coaches, coaching coordinator, and executive team will briefly interview and train you to host your very own classes through the Coaching Development program.
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