Top school-aged public speaker in Australia

Molly Hoogland of Year 11 has been named the national winner of the Plain English Speaking Award, organised by The Arts Unit of the NSW Department of Education.

Sixteen-year-old Molly competed against students aged 15-18 from government and non-government schools across Australia, progressing from early rounds and winning the NSW final along the way.

Molly gave two outstanding speeches – her eight-minute prepared speech – T-shirt Feminism – and a three-minute impromptu speech (with four minutes to prepare) on The Burning Question. In T-shirt Feminism, Molly explored the corporate exploitation of the feminist movement for advertising purposes. For the impromptu, Molly chose to speak on the digital literacy gap. Molly speaks without notes and in addition the competition requires competitors to speak without PowerPoints, microphones or lecterns.

Molly will travel to London in April 2024 representing Australia in the week-long international competition against the national winners of other English-speaking countries. Australia has not been represented in person in the international final since before COVID.

In the hours before speaking, Molly says she feels nervous but just before she stands up she doesn’t think about anything and the nerves abate – she has memorised her speech and practised numerous times.

With her favourite subjects a toss-up between Language & Literature and Global Politics, Molly is currently studying for the International Baccalaureate Diploma. At school and at home she reads widely including, for news, The Guardian, and for recreation, recent international literary fiction. She also enjoys watching documentaries and tv interviews, saying she is interested in the way people think and why they vote the way they do. Her career plans are focused on either law – as a barrister – or journalism – as a political reporter. To get her there she is hoping to study the double degrees of Law and International Relations at ANU.

Surprisingly, Molly had given up Public Speaking in recent years and it was only thanks to her Santa Sabina teachers that she found the confidence to take it up again.

‘I wouldn’t have been able to do this competition at all without the support offered by the school and the fact that they put me in the competition’, she said.

‘It made me free more confident about actually trying’.

Molly has won numerous other awards this year including the Premier’s Anzac Memorial Scholarship (a two-week historical study tour to Singapore and Darwin to learn about our nation’s military past and the importance of commemoration) and with her 11A debating team, the Year 11 Metropolitan Final of the Catholic Schools Debating Association of NSW.

Victoria Harper
Publications and Marketing Officer