Our guest adjudicator for the prestigious John Fry Public Speaking Competition, held on Wednesday 7 March, was Juliet Bacon. A senior TV producer, she has worked on many
of the most successful factual programmes of the last decade, including

This Morning, The Wright Stuff, I’m a Celebrity – Get Me Out Of Here, Big Brother, The Only Way is Essex, Saturday Kitchen, Lorraine and Richard & Judy.

She was extremely impressed with the six finalists’ charismatic delivery, intelligent arguments and coolness under pressure.

The topics allocated to the finalists were:

• Aoife Grant-Stevenson | ‘The pen is mightier than the sword’
  
• Aisling Flaherty | ‘Necessity is the mother of invention’
  
• Zoe Felton | ‘Time and tide wait for no one’
  
• Raisa Kudesheva | ‘Dying is easy; it’s living that’s hard’
  
• Anna Rayson | ‘The best things in life are free’
• 
  Jess Hawes | ‘Variety is the spice of life’

Congratulations to everyone who took part in the preliminary and final rounds, and to the eventual winner, Aisling Flaherty.

Watch videos of all the speeches here

.