Jack Barwell

My name is Jack Barwell. I grew up in a political household and have been involved in campaigning ever since I was 10 years old. Through my time at school, I developed leadership experience through being on our school council, running the prefects team and being vice-captain at school. Once I reached university, I continued my studies in the field of politics and was heavily involved in societies becoming president of Speak Easy society, chairman and speaker secretary of the debating society and political liaison officer of the conservative association.

Being on these committees and eventually reaching the status of president demonstrates not only my team working ability, as for example as chairman I had to run a department with three other people in it but also my leadership skills. I'm able to manage my time and organise events to run speaker events with over 200 people in attendance and have created a vision that people have bought into.

I think my greatest skill is my public speaking skills. I spent considerable amounts of time teaching public speaking and debating to young secondary school and primary school kids in my local area and plan to do so down here in Devon where I'm at university. I've also run for council, speaking to voters about the issues that matter to them, have the confidence to chair public debates at debating society, speak at hustings events asking for people's votes and appear frequently on the student radio both on news hour which is a political debate show and on uncommon ground where I debate members of the labour university Society. This shows that not only am I a confident speaker but I'm also willing to pass on my experience and teach other people everything I know. I believe these skills are very transferable to the sorts of jobs I want to do in the future.

Alongside my interest in public speaking and debating I run a project called bridge the gap. It's all about giving state school secondary kids the opportunity to achieve the heights that private school kids often have an advantage in such as applications to Oxbridge and other Russell Group universities. I created the idea, approached others that had been at my school and across the country to help me form a leadership team and designed a schedule to run online modules, critical thinking workshops, Oxbridge exam prep and interview prep over the summer and into the autumn. We successfully had over 200 kids sign up in our first year during the summer of 2022 and are running at the project again for a second year into 2023. I've had students who took part in the first year ask to be involved in the leadership going forwards which gives me great confidence that this is a project that will outlive my time at university.