School and University Ancient Languages Teaching: Different Purposes, Different Audiences

A Changing Educational Context

Ancient languages teaching in schools currently operates within a distinctive educational environment. National policy provides relatively little specific guidance for subjects such as Latin and Greek, creating a vacuum that is often filled by influential figures in educational discourse, published media commentary (especially on unfiltered social media) and school-wide pedagogical fashions. Examples include ‘Knowledge-Rich’ curricula, cold-calling, ‘no hands-up’ and 'Retrieval Practice'. Much of this is inspired, rightly or wrongly, by the writings of such educational gurus as Doug Lemov and his book 'Teach Like a Champion', which offer 'failsafe' routines for teaching in every situation, along with handy labels for teachers to recall when they need to use them.

There are huge debates around direct and whole-class teaching, enquiry-learning, the place of coursework, group / independent working, digital resources. Senior leadership teams frequently expect departments to demonstrate alignment with approved whole-school teaching practices, shaping curriculum design and resource selection. In some extreme cases, Multi-Academy Trusts (such as Astrea and Dixons) require lessons to follow the same format.

How these individual pedagogical approaches and lesson templates relate to the subject specific needs of teaching classical languages, literature and civilisation are, i believe, up for debate in themselves.

Meanwhile, the recent publication of the Milburn Report suggests that the there is a negative impact of the current examination-focused education system in England on students’ engagement and participation (Milburn Report, 2026, section 383).

Different Audiences

Schools

School pupils are a captive audience in a way that university students are not. Ancient languages are taught within restricted timetable allocations and within externally prescribed qualification frameworks. Teachers must work within guided learning hours, examination specifications and the practical realities of maintaining viable class sizes. Guided learning hours are suggestions from the examination boards at GCSE (120-140 hours for OCR Latin) and at A level (360 hours for OCR Latin). This does not take into account time spent prior to GCSE. Few people would consider doing GCSE with no prior learning, but provision does vary hugely between schools, with some offering one year only at key stage 3 (see Hunt 2024).

Consequently, successful school provision depends upon sustaining student engagement. Motivation research, particularly the work of Deci & Ryan and Dörnyei, highlights the importance of interest, enjoyment, perceived relevance and social factors in sustaining participation. Ancient languages teachers therefore need to consider, roughly at the following ages, what motivates them to study languages:

Ages 11-12: enjoyment and classroom engagement;

Ages 13-14: interest in ancient cultures and societies;

Ages 15-16: anxiety about peer perceptions;

Ages 17-18: examination success and progression opportunities.

The challenge for teachers, then, is not simply building language knowledge and developing practice in language skills, but also maintaining a healthy progression pipeline from Key Stage 3 through GCSE and, ideally, into post-16 study. They tend to bear in mind the different stages under which students encounter language learning and good teachers will use language learning materials and emphasise teaching approaches which speak to them at each stage.

Universities

Universities serve a different audience. Students choose to study ancient languages and do so within a subject discipline rather than a school qualification framework. The purposes of study extend beyond language acquisition to include engagement with primary sources, historical interpretation, literary criticism, material culture and independent scholarly inquiry.

Increasingly, however, universities also teach students with little or no prior experience of Latin or Greek, and often with little language learning of any kind beyond age 14. This raises important questions about the relationship between school preparation and university expectations. Simply, the long development of language knowledge and skills development, aimed at success in examinations in schools, which used to be the prerequisite for entry to university study post A level, is not guaranteed.

The School Purpose

Perhaps we ought to be trying to get more students in schools. Then, more would flow through the pipeline to university. The issue then is not one of "dumbing down" ancient languages to make more people do them. Rather, schools must balance intellectual rigour with the practical necessity of sustaining enrolment. Cazzoli and de Medieros, professors at the University of Durham, discussing the 2025 HEPI review into the decline of Modern Languages uptake in universities, noted: ‘What appears as declining demand is more accurately understood as the result of uneven access to language learning across the school system.’ A similar situation exists for classical languages.

The traditional progression route is increasingly fragile. Financial pressures make post-16 Latin provision difficult to justify in many schools, weakening the transition between GCSE and university study. These have contributed to a halving of the numbers of students who take A level Latin over the last 40 years or so.

A and AS Level Latin entries 1990-2025 (source, various (c) Steven Hunt)

GCSE Latin reflects these realities. Its primary focus is reading comprehension and the development of critical reading skills through prescribed literary texts. Students typically encounter narrative extracts and verse anthologies rather than the broader range of documentary, epigraphic, technical and historical materials that characterise classical scholarship. Teaching resources and classroom practices naturally evolve to support these assessment objectives. Would a wider variety of text types be more attarctive?

Teaching Materials and Pedagogical Tensions

Ideally, teaching materials should align with both the aims of the qualification and sound pedagogical principles. In practice, different resources often reflect different educational priorities.

The Cambridge Latin Course and Suburani emphasise contextualised reading, narrative, and gradual language acquisition, while resources such as Taylor's Latin to GCSE and De Romanis place greater emphasis on grammatical analysis, translation, and textual evidence. These approaches broadly reflect language-learning and subject-disciplinary traditions, both of which influence GCSE teaching.

The GCSE examination itself attempts to accommodate both traditions, but not successfully. The unseen translation is often unlike the kinds of authentic Latin texts encountered by scholars. They are 'one of a kind' - designed, as far as possible, to create some kind of bell-curve in results, to show that students exhibiti a range of attainment to fit pre-conceived ideas of what attainment should look like. Set texts can become highly predictable and susceptible to examination-focused preparation. Meanwhile, the civilisation component occupies a substantial place within the qualification despite not being language study in a strict sense. In practice, because the set texts are the same for every pupil, and the translation tests is the same for every pupil, every pupil is subject to the same teaching and the hoped-for bell-curve distribution of examination results is not realised. Instead, because pupils from the middle and lower attainment range tend not to choose or to be offered Latin in the first place, most Latin grades bunch towards the top end of the grade scheme. This 'bunching' effect is even worse in ancient Greek. Would teachers be happier if they had more pupils, if the examinations were more accessible, and more grade 1-5s?

Many of these tensions continue into A Level. The examination consists of three main elements: unseen translation from set authors (Livy and Ovid); prose composition or unseen comprehension exercise; set texts (one prose, one verse – changing every two years). Bunching at the highest grades occurs here too.

So, for those who get through GCSE and do go on to A level, in ancient languages, we are talking about those who have, on the whole, the highest attainment in their cohort, and the luckiest - because they attend the schools where the subjects are offered and where the schools can afford small classess.

Implications for Universities

University teaching serves different purposes from school teaching and therefore may require different pedagogical assumptions.

If schools are primarily concerned with sustaining participation, progression, and qualification success, universities are concerned with developing disciplinary expertise, independent inquiry and engagement with the full range of ancient evidence.

The growing number of students arriving without school qualifications in Latin or Greek further complicates the relationship between the two sectors. It may therefore be unhelpful to assume that school and university ancient languages teaching should share the same aims, methods or measures of success.

Instead, a productive conversation may begin by recognising that they serve different audiences, operate under different constraints and pursue different educational purposes.