Steven Hunt

While I was in Bristol, to watch my daughter complete her first Bristol Half-Marathon, We went for a walk across the Downs towards the great muddy estuary that is the River Avon. To Sea Mills, in fact. A place with little distinction, except for the railway line that goes through there and onwards to Avonmouth and Severn Beach. behind us lay Brunel's great Suspension Bridge, and ahead the towering M5 Motorway as it belted across the Avon Gorge. At Sea Mills it was all privet

There was good news from the Classical Association on Tuesday that OCR would hold off the withdrawal of AS Latin and AS Classical Greek exams until final entries in 2028. That gives teachers more time to work out what to do and the community to figure out if there are any alternatives they want to pursue developing. Who knows, in the meantime, the present Secretary of State might reveal their thinking about examinations and surprise us all with a return to modular exams again

How many times have we heard that 'evidence-based teaching' is the new thing - as if we had never had it before? It's not new. Back in 2007, the same debates were being held. In his book 'The Art and Science of Teaching' Robert Marzano argued that while evidence-based strategies inform instruction, their execution requires the teacher's judgment, intuition and adaptation. Who would've thought? It's the TEACHER that really matters. Here's a rough summary - we know that all abo

Overview This blog provides a comprehensive overview of qualifications, assessments, and curricula for teaching Latin, Greek, and classical civilization at pre-GCSE at both national and international levels. It includes details on various qualification types, assessment structures, and resources, as well as a bibliography of articles and relevant website addresses. The blog is a version of some CPD I carried out on behalf of the charity Classics for All on 6th May 2026. 1. La

Apollo I found myself at the Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields last night. I’ve been many a time since I was first shown the museum one of the tours of duty one made in the ‘Greek and Roman art and architecture’ module in my undergraduate years in Classics at King’s College, and most recently to show an architect friend round who’d never been before (how can this be, one asks?). It was an unexpected setting for an event I wouldn’t normally gravitate toward (sorr

I was talking to one of my school teacher colleagues about the reasons why they chose to stop using ecce Romani and move to Suburani. of course, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with using ecce Romani, but the teacher felt like they needed an update. Suburani has what they thought they needed for teaching in their all-girls' school. I include some teachers' tips to suggest how the reader of this blog might use Suburani too - and some of this is, obviously, applicable to ot

Over coffee yesterday, Molly Willett from the Cambridge Classics outreach team told me about a visit she’d just hosted: four Year 12 students from a London school, accompanied by their teacher – who happened to be a Cambridge Classics alumna who trained on the PGCE with me. They spent the day exploring the Faculty, having a mini-seminar with an academic, enjoying lunch and being taken through the Museum of Classical Archaeology on a guided tour. They even had time to see a li

Becky Coe, me and Emma Cope - just after we had delivered our own workshop on digital grammatical analysers for Latin reading comprehension Conferences remind us why we do this work. They gather the people who care about the same strange, brilliant things we do - language pedagogy, the ancient world, the craft of teaching - and put them in a set of rooms long enough for ideas to spark. This year’s CA conference, which was held in the spectacular Business Centre of Manchester

I was in a classroom yesterday, observing lessons (which is part of my day job running the PGCE), and it occurred to me that the arrangement of the room was pretty near perfect! I mentioned it to my colleague and co--observer and she agreed that it was just about the nicest thing to have - your own classroom set out in the way that you want it. The perfect classroom? I'd advise all new teachers, especially the inexperienced, to argue for their own classroom base. In my final

On 26 th March 2026, Melania Trump, the First Lady, walked down some red carpet in the White House, accompanied by ‘Figure 3’, a humanoid robot built in the USA. Mrs Trump (right) was hosting a roundtable event at the inaugural Fostering the Future Together Global Coalition Summit (FFTGCS for short). The world and their robots were watching. Unlike lovable, gold-plated Star Wars character C-3PO, Figure 3 seemed (to me, at least) rather more sinister, with its smooth blank st

The three main UK Classical Organizations ( The Classical Association , Classics for All and the Association for Latin Teaching ) have now published their letters in response to the announcement form Cambridge OCR examinations that it will discontinue the AS Latin and AS Classical Greek qualifications after last exams in June 2027. They hope to persuade the examinations board to change its mind. The letters, which were released on different social media platforms, are collat

At this time of the year, one always starts to think of targets for the period after Easter. How should one tighten up teaching practice with the PGCE student teachers? Here are some ideas that crop up every year. Resist teaching pupils how to form Latin verbs, nouns and adjectives for production when the lesson goal is reading and comprehension. 🎯 Use time spent describing Latin for practising reading instead. Resist spending 80% of the time on grammar and only 20% on voc

Every so often, an article pops up that tells you far more about the writer’s insecurities than about the subject they claim to be analysing. Harry Mount’s latest piece on Ancient Greek is a perfect example. He even lifts figures from this blog (without attribution) while somehow managing to miss the actual context that explains why ancient languages are struggling in schools. I am going to start with some basic information. Curriculum Pressure Since the 1988 Baker reforms,

I've been asked by Classics for All to give some CPD on pre-GCSE Classics exams. This will be on 6th May 2026. The link to sign up for the online course is here . It's from 4-5PM If you're new to Classics Education or just want some refreshing or reminding, this CPD is for you. I aim to cover pre- GCSE exams - such as: WJEC Level 1 Latin Certificates OCR Entry Level for Latin ICCG Greek ELEX and EGEX US qualifications which might be useful LanguageCert Other informal qualific

AS qualifications – well into the doldrums Thursday night and a message pops up on my WhatsApp: "It’s like they’re trying to harm our numbers," a teacher colleague sends, along with a screen shot of the news that the OCR examinations board has decided, out of the blue, to withdraw AS Latin and Classical Greek. Final exams for these levels will be in June 2027. The withdrawal of key exams is not reserved just for Latin and Classical Greek, as the OCR Subject Update shows. And

On Monday 16 February, PGCE Classics students from Cambridge, Liverpool Hope and King’s College London gathered at London’s Senate House for a full day dedicated to one of the most pressing questions in education today: how should we use artificial intelligence in the Classics classroom? As always, the day was expertly hosted by Grainne Cassidy, Education officer at the Classical Association Teaching Board, who has been instrumental in shaping these cross‑institution trainin

Looking for tigers is not something that features in my usual weekly schedule. I don’t pop out for milk, pick up the dry cleaning, and casually scan the horizon for stripey predators. And yet, there we were: on safari near Ranthambore, the very place where Katy Perry and Russell Brand got married (at least that was what I was told – I wasn’t personally invited). Whether that’s a glowing endorsement or a cautionary tale is… open to interpretation. A Hotel Straight Out of a Jun

On the evening of 3 rd February 2026 I had the honour of speaking at this event. I explained the hard work done by teachers and students in the UK in making Ancient Greek and Ancient Greece accessible, teachable and in the end assessable within the school environment. I make some suggestions for greater involvement of our political partners and drew attention to future plans. International Day of the Greek Language - European Parliament session International Day of the Greek

On our final day in New Delhi, we decided it was time. India Gate had been hovering on our mental to‑do list all week, and now, armed with Google Maps, stubbornness and a questionable sense of direction, we set off to see it up close. India Gate, if you haven’t met it, is an enormous sandstone arch designed by Edwin Lutyens., the British architect who was commissioned to design a new city – New Delhi – as the High Command of the British Empire in India in the early twentieth

Review — English Translation Steven Hunt & John Bulwer (eds.), Teaching Classics Worldwide. Successes, Challenges and Developments , London / New York / Oxford / Delhi / Sydney, Bloomsbury Academic, 2025, XII+468 pp. We are presented with a book whose title promises to give readers information about the current state of Classics teaching not only in the territories where its history developed historically and geographically—that is, parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa—but acros