Great leaders make great speeches and great speeches can change the world. This summer, students studying Get Ahead Speech Writing learnt about the language and structure of speeches. They practised writing their own small speeches. However, more, much more was to follow. Next step on our intensive course was to make a speech that would make a difference in the real world.

The students learnt about the situation of refugees escaping from the war in Syria. When they had watched a clip from a documentary about the terrible situation that child refugees are facing, our students wanted to do something.

Working together in an international team, Maria (Mexico), Maria (UK), Weronika (Poland), Marta (Ukraine) and Zvonimir (Croatia) wrote a speech to inform the other students at More Than English about the situation and request them to donate money so that a child refugee can benefit from the educational services that More Than English can provide.

We are extremely proud to announce that the group’s speech was very successful in persuading the students to donate very generously £260 to help another student in a much worse situation.

Congratulations to the speech making group on writing and delivering a very powerful speech. Congratulations to all the students for being so generous.

In the coming weeks and months on this blog we will keep you up to date with how the money will be used to help a child refugee. For now, please watch the speech, and please contact us if you would like to help a child refugee too.

This blog is written by David Meddows, Course Leader on the Leadership programme and owner of More Than English

In this blog, Zvonimir from Croatia writes about Get Ahead Speech Making

This Get Ahead option will indeed get you ahead. Whether the audience is your class or the whole world, your speech could be a game changer.

Having no knowledge about speech making, we started analyzing one of the world’s most popular speeches, Obama’s acceptance speech. The first time we listened to it, all we could say was that it was good. As time passed, we learned a lot of complex techniques that Obama used in his speech. Elevated language, repetition and the magic rule of three are just a few examples.

Now that we were much more educated about writing speeches, it was time to write our own. What could a couple of teenagers write about?

Environmental protection? The greenhouse effect? Problems in society? Maybe. But a motivating speech before our forest paintball battle? Much better! Despite talking a lot about speech making, we were still insecure. Our teacher gave us a boost of confidence by playing a speech from the movie Braveheart. It did help us!

The speech we wrote

was quite good. Actually, it was so good that it impressed our teacher! Feeling really proud of ourselves, we left the classroom, ready for new challenges ahead of us.

Francesca (15, Italy) reflects on her experience of doing Get Ahead Film 

One of many classes you can choose for the Get Ahead options is Film Making.

You have the opportunity to work with an actual film maker, who will help you to create your own little movie. I did it in the first week, and my teacher was a lovely young lady called Jenny. On the first day she explained to us some basic notions about filming, then she asked us to start thinking about a story line for our film. Once that was settled, we started thinking about the roles everyone would take on during the filming.

I got to act to act with 3 other girls and everyone got to use the camera at least once in every scene. During the experience we were helped and guided by Jenny, but we could always give our opinions and decide what to do in pretty much every shot. When we finished the filming part, the teacher edited the shots and on the last day she showed us the final result.

It was really funny and I was really proud of what we had achieved.