Teachers and classicists across England have noted a dramatic rise in the numbers of children starting secondary school who are expressing an interest in the subject. It is 40 years since it was dropped as a compulsory subject at school, but specialists are hoping that the resurgent enthusiasm will result in more children studying Latin at GCSE and A level, in spite of it being seen as a difficult subject.

In 1988, the first full year of GCSE examinations and the start of the national curriculum, more than 16,000 pupils took GCSE Latin, of whom about half were from state schools. Since then the numbers have fallen, to just 9,743 last year.

However, as Latin teachers retired and fewer schools offered the language, the Cambridge School Classics Project (CSCP) embarked on a scheme to teach Latin online. Its package, designed for schools without Latin teachers, consisted of books, a CD-Rom interactive project and “e-tutors” to answer pupils’ questions by e-mail and help to mark work.

Now the organisation estimates that about 40,000 children aged 11 and older are learning Latin, and says that more schools want to take it up. It has become so popular that CSCP is employing a full-time tutor to teach Latin at GCSE level via a live video link.

Will Griffiths, director of the CSCP, said that about 1,200 schools were offering Latin. He said that the increase had been caused partly by the number of non-specialist teachers able to offer the subject with the help of computer study aids, and because schools were having to find new ways of keeping bright children interested.

“The Gifted and Talented initiative has forced schools to provide for bright children, so schools are perhaps associating Latin with the more able children, and also more money is going into different out-of-hours learning projects,” he said.

Jeannie Cohen, founder of the Friends of Classics, a charity that gives money to schools to teach Latin, said that she had also noticed a new keenness. “We are a small charity, but anecdotally we’ve noticed a three or four-fold increase in schools writing to us for grants to teach Latin to children at that level,” she said.

At Saffron Walden High School, in Essex, where pupils have been studying Latin online and via video link in recent years, numbers have steadily increased and the school now employs Ann Dodgson, a part-time GCSE Latin teacher. She credits the revitalisation to computers bringing it to life but also to its exclusivity as a subject. “It has parent appeal, because it’s quite an exclusive subject, certainly here in Saffron Walden,” she said.

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