Record-breaking: two Hungarians won the Oxford Schools debate competition again!

Lili Törőcsik and Julianna Balázs on the left. Johanna Telek and Benjamin Amir on the right: they also got into the finals. Source: Facebook/Milestone Institute

Two Hungarian students won one of the world’s most prestigious debate competitions in Oxford. They broke a record! What is more, the pair beat all participants for two years in a row.

Oxford Schools

Source: oxfordschools.net

Never before has the same team won one of the biggest and most prestigious debate competitions, the Oxford Schools, two years in a row. As eduline.hu reported, this year, two Hungarian high school students broke the record: Julianna Balázs and Lili Törőcsik beat hundreds of teams to win the world competition.

The Oxford Union is the organiser of one of the world’s largest and most prestigious debate competitions specifically for secondary school students, the Oxford Schools. The finals of the competition usually involve between one hundred and one hundred and twenty teams.

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The competitor teams debate in English on topics including politics, international affairs, and law, among others.

Julianna Balázs and Lili Törőcsik entered the Oxford Schools as students of the Milestone Institute. Julianna is a student of Karinthy Frigyes High School, while Lili goes to the Fazekas Mihály High School, both in Budapest.

Breaking a record

This time, they won in the “ESL”, English as a Second Language, category. It was not their first year: last year, they came first in the “newcomer” category.

This means that they have already won first place in two of the three Oxford Schools categories.

This is unprecedented: never before in the history of the competition has the same team beaten the other competing teams in two different categories in two consecutive years.

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Last year, Index.hu reported the following about the two girls’ victory:

“The defeated teams included the team of one of the oldest private schools in the UK, Harrow School. The success of the two Hungarian tenth-graders is made even greater by the fact that in Hungary, there are few educational institutions that have a debate club, unlike many European and Asian countries where it is practised as a school sport.”

Altogether 4 Hungarian teams took part in this year’s competition. The Milestone team was joined in Oxford by the American International School of Budapest (AISB) and two teams from Engame Academy.