Steven Hunt

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

Here’s the third in a series of brief round-ups for the end of 2025 for Classics Education in the UK #3: Jobs for Classics teachers in the UK in 2024-5 I collated the information for these statistics from the publicly available advertisements in the Times Educational Supplement and the Classics Library. Please cite me if you use any of the information in this blog. Any errors are my own. How many jobs? Fig. 1. Classics Education jobs advertised from 2018-9 to 2024-5 (c) Steve

Here’s the second in a series of brief round-ups for the end of 2025 for Classics Education in the UK #2: State-maintained school entries for GCSE examination in England in 2025 First, some headline numbers. I compiled these statistics from those publicly available from the Department for Education. Any errors are my own. If you use any of the information in this blog, please credit me. The total number of entries for each subject is given in Figure 1 below. Fig. 1. Total num

Here’s the first in a series of brief round-ups for the end of 2025 for Classics Education in the UK #1: Examination entries in England and Scotland 2025 Examination entries in 2025: England England has a number of different examination boards which offer examinations in Classics Education. For Latin, both WJEC / Eduqas and Cambridge OCR offer examinations up to GCSE. Cambridge OCR offers examinations for Classical Greek, Classical Civilisation and Ancient History at GCSE, AS

I’m always up for a bit of technology and Classics. In this case, a friend pointed out this immersive exhibition at London’s Excel exhibition hall in Docklands. There was a YouTube video as well. It looked – kind of okay. Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained. We went along. It was Sunday, about 1pm. It took some time to find the place as it was located in an exhibition space under the main Excel centre rather than in it: access was literally on the dockside. Inside, it lo

After another delve into the ART archives, I found this article in Latin teaching XXXVI No. 3 (1983) by Ken Dowden, then of University College, Cardiff. He is now Emeritus Professor of Classics at the University of Birmingham. Teachers may know his book Religion and the Romans , published by Bristol Classical Press in 1992. My PGCE Latin with Classics students at the Cast Gallery, Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge (October 2025). In 1983 Ken makes a number of impor

This blog is an extract and commentary on a review of the first edition of the Latin course book Ecce Romani. It was first published in the ARLT’s journal Latin Teaching XXXIII, 6, p 224 in 1971. The reviewer WSW (I have been unable to ascertain their name) refers to two books in their review. Front Cover of the 1st edition of Ecce Romani Like the one I have blogged about before from this same journal, I think WSW's review sheds some light on pedagogical thinking of the time