As they meet next Tuesday, for the last time before the summer break, they will be deciding whether people should always be allowed treatment on the NHS, regardless of their lifestyle choices.

 

Ms Tattersall, who heads the Loreto Debate Club, said it has been a busy and very successful year with passionate and argumentative students getting to grips with some of the stickiest political, moral and ethical issues around.

 

One of these students, Katherine Lyonnette, who is hoping to go to on to study history at Oxford in the autumn, said the club had been a warm and welcoming place for students to exercise their freedom of speech.

 

Katherine took part in the national ‘Debating Matters’ competition where she won best individual speaker three times and here she sums up her thoughts about the club:

 

"For the last two years, I have been part of a group that meets once a week to decide how to run the world. We talk about everything - nothing is out of bounds. In my short time here we have legalised some drugs, forbidden women over fifty from having babies, said violent video games have no effect on children and disagreed with the French government’s decision to ban the burqa. Unlike the country at large, we voted ‘yes’ to AV and at the end of the year we threw David Cameron out of a hot air balloon - so don't you wish we were in charge? I hope that Loreto Debate Club continues to be a place where people go to talk about ideas: good ideas; bad ideas and mind-bogglingly complicated ideas."