Keir Starmer’s right, speaking skills can change your life. They did mine | Chiara LaFerla

Keir Starmer pledged last week to improve children’s speaking skills across the board. I think it’s needed more than ever. I grew up in south London, mainly in Croydon, in an immigrant family. My secondary school was very strict – we were encouraged not to speak out. I went from being this loud character in primary school to becoming really quiet in secondary school, with very bad anxiety.

In 2018, aged 15, I got involved with a programme called Speak Out Challenge, initiated by the charity Speakers Trust to help young people become better public speakers. It was a one-day course for up to 30 people at our school. We did lots of workshops and learned the importance of eye contact, hand gestures and speaking slowly. We learned how to structure a speech and to use bullet points to help you remember it. Most importantly, we learned to listen to and learn from each other.

When it came to delivering my speech to the group, I was so scared that I locked myself in the toilets and cried. I came out with a knot in my stomach, but I did it in the end. Then we got to speak in front of the whole year, which was even crazier, but luckily I didn’t cry that time.

I got through to the regionals and won. The grand final was at the Cambridge Theatre in the West End. I had that knot in my stomach again but also the feeling that this was normal, I’d done this before. I didn’t win, but I came out feeling so enriched, and now I jump at the chance to get onstage and talk to people.

Since the challenge, I’ve co-hosted massive awards evenings and delivered online lectures to more than 100 people. Arriving at Queen Mary University of London to study English literature and drama was really scary, but I had the confidence to speak up on subjects I was passionate about. The Speakers Trust programme has given me the ability to voice my opinion, to not shy away from things and to generally be a nicer person. I used to be terrified to even say good morning to someone. Now I do it all the time.

A lot of the people who get the opportunity to speak publicly are in a position, thanks to their education, that the rest of the population cannot compete with. To provide that education across state schools would be life-changing. Expressing yourself confidently is such an important skill. If I had gone to a private school and got to do that a lot more often, I can’t even imagine what sort of person I’d be.

After Covid, with everything becoming more and more digital, it’s so important not to forget about human interaction. It’s also important to learn to think critically. As a young person, you listen to a lot of adults and you just think, OK, they’re probably right because they’re talking about it in such a clever way. But when you learn those skills, you can go, oh, I see what you’re doing, and actually, do I agree with that?

Public speaking means getting people to listen to you and to engage with your ideas, and if that’s not the first step to something amazing, then I don’t know what is.