Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) must be installed in every class room. Give your views either for or against this statement.

MODEL ANSWER (approximately 340 words) — arguing AGAINST the statement

The case for cameras in classrooms is easy to make and sounds unanswerable: they deter bullying, they protect children from abuse, and they settle disputes about what happened. I want to take those arguments seriously and explain why I still think the proposal is wrong.

Begin with what a classroom is for. It is the place where a child is supposed to risk being wrong — to put up a hand with a half-formed idea, to try an answer and fail publicly, to ask the stupid question that turns out not to be stupid. All of that requires a certain privacy, and privacy is exactly what a camera removes. A student who knows he is being recorded behaves like someone being recorded. He is more careful, which sounds like an improvement until you remember that careful is the opposite of curious.

The same is true of teachers. A teacher on camera teaches the syllabus; a teacher who is not on camera digresses, argues, admits she does not know something, and occasionally says the thing a class remembers for twenty years. Surveillance does not make teaching better. It makes it safer, which is not the same thing.

There is also the question of who watches. Footage of minors, stored indefinitely, accessible to an administrator or a parent or anyone who obtains the password, is a genuine risk — and the schools proposing these systems are rarely the ones with the security to protect them.

The strongest argument on the other side is child safety, and it deserves an answer rather than a dismissal. But cameras in CORRIDORS, STAIRWELLS, GATES and PLAYGROUNDS address that danger far better, because those are the unsupervised places where harm actually happens. A classroom already contains an adult.

Watch the empty spaces. Leave the classroom alone. A child who is observed every minute of the day does not learn to be trusted, because he has never once been trusted.

WHAT THIS QUESTION SPECIFICALLY REQUIRES

The instruction is "either for OR against", so take one side and hold it. State it in the opening paragraph.

THE KEY MOVE here is to CONCEDE THE OPPOSING CASE FIRST. Child safety is a genuinely strong argument, and an essay that pretends otherwise reads as dishonest. Notice that the model states the case for cameras in its opening sentence and calls it "unanswerable" — which buys the reader’s trust before the argument begins.

THE CLOSING TECHNIQUE is worth copying: rather than simply refusing, the model ACCEPTS the underlying concern and redirects it — cameras in corridors, not classrooms. An argumentative essay that offers an alternative is far stronger than one that only says no.

Vary sentence length. The short sentences ("A classroom already contains an adult.") land the points that matter. FORMAT AND MARKS DIVISION: see "Composition — grade bands and marking" in the Writing Formats & Marking (Reference) chapter, along with the worked model for this composition type.

USE THIS AS A MODEL, NOT AS AN ANSWER TO MEMORISE. The question asks for an ORIGINAL composition, and every year examiners identify scripts reproduced from guide books; a memorised answer can be penalised for plagiarism and will in any case read as borrowed. Study this piece for its STRUCTURE — how it opens, how the paragraphs are ordered, where the required tasks are answered, how it ends — and then write your own, about your own school, your own family, your own town. Your own specific detail is worth more marks than anyone else’s polished sentence.