Two interesting pieces of news have been passed on to me in recent days, both of which I will happily add to my arsenal of answers to the question of why I am studying such a “pointless” subject at university.
Firstly, a researcher at the University of Cambridge School Classics project has spent the last five months telephoning every single secondary school in the country, and has discovered that there are currently 1,081 schools which offer Latin, 447 of them independent schools and 634 of them state schools. 58 more state schools are due to start offering the subject in September.
For the last few years, for the first time since the introduction of modern language GCSEs in the 1980s, Latin has been offered in more state than independent schools. I don’t want to be overly optimistic about this. Latin has hardly found its way into hundreds of sink-estate comprehensive schools throughout Britain – doubtless of the 634 state schools a large number will be selective grammars. Moreover 634 schools make up only 16% of state schools, while 447 is 60% of independent schools. Nevertheless, the figure is an extremely encouraging one, reflecting the success of the £5 million DfES funding for digital materials to support the study of Classics in schools, and of the Government’s “Gifted and Talented” initiative.
Overall, there are now 115 more schools offering Latin than there were in 2008. More than anything, this reflects the increasing awareness that Latin, unlike subjects such as English, cannot be ‘dumbed down’, making a GCSE or A level in it a very useful tool for any pupil wishing to prove their intelligence. Research by the Cambridge Schools Classics Project has shown that while the recommended number of tuition hours for a GCSE course is 120-140, for Latin the average input is 272. That is twice as much. Without wishing to blow my own trumpet, Latin is obviously harder than other subjects. This used to be a reason for schools to stop offering it – now the opposite is true.
The second piece of news (http://cherwell.org/content/10631) I received was that a group of 20 Oxfordshire students who have been studying Latin from scratch on Saturday mornings for the past two years received their GCSE results on Tuesday. The programme was offered by the Oxford University’s Latin Teaching Scheme, and the students were taught by Oxford lecturers and local teachers. There was an extremely low dropout rate, and the students achieved 14 A* to C grades (including 3 A*s and 3As), and many of them are going on to study the subject at A level.
The success (and very existence) of this scheme is an excellent thing – but it is also a shame that these students have had to give up their Saturday mornings to achieve such a worthwhile qualification. The Oxford Classics faculty runs the programme (and funds it entirely without government subsidy) because not a single state school in Oxfordshire offers Latin to GCSE or A level. Given the evident rise of Latin elsewhere, this is surprising and a great shame. It is proof that the work of the Government and of universities to facilitate and encourage Latin in the state sector is far from done.
However there may be a limit to how much of a renaissance Latin in schools can experience. There is a huge dearth of qualified Latin teachers, with only 27 PGCE places available annually, and up to 70 teachers retiring each year. 29 universities in this country offer Classics courses, and although none of them require students to have studied Latin before beginning a degree, in practice those without prior experience rarely apply.
But Latin is neither dead nor even dying. A subject which has been shown actively to improve children’s abilities in reading, comprehension and vocabulary, to lead to higher than average scores on national achievement tests and even to improve performance in several areas of mathematical reasoning should be very much alive, and it seems that schools are starting to remember this. I wish it a long and healthy life.
