JCoSS enjoys a Latin romance

Last summer, the government announced a £4 million drive to encourage the study of Latin in 40 state schools in England. There should be “no difference to what pupils learn at state schools and independent schools,” the then-Education Secretary, Gavin Williamson, declared.

When it comes to classics, JCoSS is already ahead of the game. Latin is now enjoying its seventh year on the curriculum at the cross-communal school in East Barnet. The four students who took the subject at GCSE all gained the top grade nine; the school’s first A-level student in Latin sat it last summer.

It all started with an after-school club in Latin taken by classics teacher Hannah Trup in 2014. 

“I was just finishing off my training as an English teacher at JCoSS and thought I’d speak to Patrick [Moriarty, the head] about getting a job,” she recalled. “He saw I had a classics degree and was much more interested in that.

“We did the Gruffalo in Latin and did a performance of it. We did lots of fun things — that’s how it often starts in a school that has never had any classics.”

The next year, it was offered as a language option and there are now some 40 children taking it from year eight to GCSE with a second A-level student in the sixth form. With schools ever-conscious of balancing their budgets, it takes commitment to stick by a small subject. Head of classics at JCoSS Edward Arden is grateful to the charity Classics for All which “gave a generous grant to enable us to get started.”

Many of those attracted to it, he said, “have been hooked since childhood on Greek mythology and those wonderful extraordinary stories”.

The language can be challenging but it is “logical and structured — if you learn the rules and apply them, you’ll succeed with it”.

Introduction to Latin begins with one of the most dramatic events of antiquity — the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD that buried the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. “Extraordinary relics of the way people lived have been found, they have even got loads of bread from ovens. There’s a lot of minute detail from that world that really comes to life alongside the Latin they are learning.”

A bonus of the GCSE, he said, is that students do literature in the original language, which would not be the case with a modern tongue. “The current theme is magic and superstition.”

It also appeals, Ms Trup added, “to students who love languages but don’t like the oral component. The beauty of learning an ancient language is you are not made to speak it.”

Hannah Meyerowitz, who is taking classical civilisation as an A-level, achieved a grade nine GCSE in Latin last summer as did her twin brother Seth. “I’m really interested in the ancient world and that mixture between the history and the language is what drew me in,” she said.

And though some of her peers might have questioned why she was opting for “a dead language”, she thinks “it’s far from dead, it exists in Italian, French, English, Spanish — it’s really useful”.

She particularly enjoyed the literature component and while the grammar proved the most difficult part, she worked hard at it until “after a while, it just clicked”.

Although classical languages carry a certain intellectual prestige, Ms Trup wants to remove “the snobbery” surrounding it. “We are keen to stress it is very much for all, it’s no harder necessarily than any other language. We don’t want to feed into the idea that it shows you are very clever. A Roman guy on the street spoke Latin because that what he spoke, not because he was very clever. 

“We’d probably like to see a greater range of abilities signing up for classics.”

But some parents need a little persuasion of its value. One response is to point to the “cultural capital” it provides, giving insight into some of the foundations of our civilisation. “So many institutions in the world we live in are derived from the Greeks and Romans — the political system around us, the architecture we see on the streets, the art we look at in the gallery,” Mr Arden said.

That broader perspective certainly registered with Kobi Kahn Harris, who gained an A* in Latin A-level at JCoSS last summer. “So much of the world we live in comes from this. You see the world in a different way,” he said.

Fascinated by stories of ancient Greek and Rome since childhood, “as a barmitzvah present my grandparents took me to Hadrian’s Wall and my parents took me to Rome”.

He is now learning Greek with a tutor during his gap year before going to Cambridge University to read classical languages in the autumn.

While Latin may remain a minority pursuit at the school, classics is “visible across the whole curriculum”, Mr Arden said; for instance, there’s a classic weeks in February with projects and assemblies based on a different ancient myth each year.

Ms Trup is particularly proud that a number of students opt for A-level classical civilisation (studying history, literature and philosophy in English) every year with some going on to choose it for their degree course.

“One of its great appeals is a wonderful escape to this Mediterranean environment and climate — what’s so not to like?,” she said. “We are reading the Odyssey in classics and we are on these luxuriant islands with nymphs dipping around and goddesses.”

When the worldly worries of Covid and climate change may weigh on young minds, “I think we all benefit from a bit of classical sunshine”.