Free resource
Debate topics for primary school.
Fifteen topics from The Debating Program’s topic bank, all tried with Years 5–6 squads. The last three were the actual Premier’s Debating Challenge state final topics in 2023, 2024 and 2025 — tell your students that. Ten-year-olds take a topic far more seriously once they know real teams debated it in a real final.
What makes a good debate topic for kids?
Three tests. It has to be genuinely two-sided — if one team’s case is self-evidently true, you’ve set a truism, and the debate is over before it starts. It has to sit inside the students’ world: school, food, sport, screens, animals, family rules. And it has to support a concrete “after the change” picture, because primary arguments are built by comparing the world right now against the world after the change. “That we should ban homework on weekends” passes all three. “That bullying is bad” fails the first one.
School life topics
- That students should be allowed to redesign their own school uniform.
- That recess and lunch should be combined into one longer break.
- That schools should have no bells and let classes run on flexible time.
- That primary schools should ban formal testing.
- That students should be able to redo a test if they do poorly.
- That schools should ban homework on weekends.
- That all students should learn to code at school.
Wider world topics
- That we should ban single-use plastics.
- That we should ban all advertising aimed at children.
- That supermarkets should only stock locally made products.
- That we should stop all logging of native forests.
- That screens should be banned from all primary classrooms.
Actual state final topics
These three were debated in the Premier’s Debating Challenge Years 5 and 6 state finals:
- That we should pay primary school teachers a bonus when their students’ results improve. (2023)
- That kids should have to complete an overnight camping and hiking trip in order to graduate primary school. (2024)
- That Years 5 and 6 students should have to volunteer at retirement villages or nursing homes. (2025)
How to use these topics in training
Don’t just hand a topic over and hope. Run it as a case-build sprint: five minutes of silent brainstorm, five minutes of download around the team, then cluster the ideas into three arguments with a case line over the top. Keep a topic ledger — one page listing every topic your squad has debated, with the date and the students involved — so nobody argues the same topic twice, and so you know what they said last time when a competition round lands on something similar.
The Debating Program includes the full topic bank, the sprint session format, and eighteen complete training sessions to run them in. See what’s inside →