Schools: Classics

Baroness Perry of Southwark Excerpts

Tuesday 6th November 2012 Grand Committee

[Baroness Perry of Southwark]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord and I thank him for securing this debate and for the delightful speech that he has made to introduce the topic. I, too, am a great lover of Latin, in particular, and I owe a lifetime debt to my big sister, who was a Cambridge classicist. She introduced me to Latin for Today: Book One a year before anyone else in my class had begun to study it, so that I was able to shine throughout my first year. That ensured that Latin has always been one of my favourite subjects.

I agree entirely with the noble Lord in his analysis of what is needed in terms of teaching and the teachers who are capable of inspiring and enthralling the young. However, I want to celebrate our success stories and how good it is that Latin is now increasing in popularity not only in independent schools, as seen by the number of young people who are taking it. As the noble Lord has said, in the past 10 years, more than 500 state secondary schools have started Latin for the first time. The previous Government are greatly to be commended for their e-course initiative with its videoconferencing and mentoring for teachers, which made a great leap forward in the popularity of the subject.

The UK has a world beater in the Cambridge Latin course. It sells more than any other classics course in the world. The Cambridge School Classics Project has given about £1 million of its profits to promote the teaching of Latin in state schools. The coalition initiative put Latin on a par with modern languages and that has helped to fuel the expansion. Secondary schools have, as I said, found that Latin and Greek are increasingly popular and that they help with the understanding of grammar and of English words and spelling. One reason why I believe that classics is so enormously helpful to young people is that it teaches them about sentence structure and so helps them to think much more clearly. It also helps them with their appalling spelling.

Another great success story is the expansion of the teaching of Latin in primary schools, which I wholly support and think is wonderful. In London alone the Iris Project, with the mayor, Boris Johnson, has started the Love Latin project in schools. Already, 200 primary schools in London alone are enjoying that programme. Teachers say that it is engaging children who, in other ways, are quite hard to reach.

For me, Minimus is the real hero of primary school Latin. Minimus is a mouse who lives with a family in Vindolanda in the Roman Britain of 100AD. He lives in the family with the fort commander’s wife and their three children. They also have a cat but, most importantly, they have Minimus who becomes a hero of the primary syllabus. He apparently has won so many friends among young children that the popularity of the Minimus course is spreading to the point where it has sold 140,000 copies throughout the United Kingdom. I am happy to say that the equivalent for ancient Greek—whether it will be a mouse or another animal, I do not know—is now being developed.

I will close with some quotes from teachers and pupils about the Minimus course. One teacher said: “There are such brilliant stories in the classics and it is so good to be able to introduce children to them”. A pupil said: “Latin helps me with writing in literary classes”. Above all, there was the pupil who said, “You learn to deal with words. You can’t talk to an ancient Roman with gestures and smiles. The language is all there is”.