#55: Confidence & Communication is a Skill with Margaret & Scarlett McCabe (co-founders of Debate Mate)

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The Debate Mate Group is a social business with 2 distinct but complementary parts – the charity Debate Mate Schools, and the business Debate Mate Limited. At its core, Debate Mate – across the entities - teaches confidence, communication and leadership from the classroom to the boardroom.
Margaret founded Debate Mate (Schools) as a non-profit in 2007 with the aim of reducing poverty, improving social mobility and tackling racism through a revolutionary education programme. The programme, which started with 200 students in London, has now reached over 125,000 young people in nearly 100 countries.

Debate Mate Limited, established in 2015, provides world-class communication and leadership training and engagement events for leading companies across the globe. Current partners range from Morgan Stanley to Meta, from Snapchat to Standard Chartered. The business launched an ed-tech platform in 2020 as a response to the Covid pandemic, that provides virtual skills-based programmes for nearly 1000 young people per week from 47 countries aged 5 and up. Courses range from learning to debate to exploring law, technology and entrepreneurship, and we currently run them in English and Arabic.

The business is raising investment this year to accelerate its technical evolution and is partnering with data science specialists from the Institute of Education to imbed ML and AI to enable them to scale their programmes.
Find out more about Margaret McCabe via: LinkedIn.
Find out more about Scarlett McCabe via: LinkedIn.
Find out more about Debate Mate via: their website, Instagram and LinkedIn.
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