The Govian Knot
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The Classical Association Teaching Board has been running consultations on the next round of qualifications reform for Classical subjects. This brief report of the situation so far was published on the website of Classics for All.
At various points I have been asked to contribute to the discussions themselves. Here are some of my own thoughts.
Rigour Without Purpose?
Several years after the introduction of the reformed GCSE and A Level language qualifications, it remains remarkably difficult to assess their impact - particularly on student numbers. The problem is not simply a lack of data, but the scale of the changes themselves. Between 2017 and 2019, qualifications were altered in fundamental ways: content specifications, exam length, number of papers and grading systems were all restructured at once. These were not incremental adjustments but a root-and-branch reform of the entire examination system. Has it been the examinations themselves that have reduced numbers in Latin and Classical Greek? Or are there external effects instead, such as financial difficulties in schools, a lack of teachers, or perhaps simple disinterest in the ancient world? Maybe the sort of pupils who seventy years ago studied Latin are now more likely to be studying STEM subjects?
And yet, the number of pupils taking non-linguistic courses has risen. Easier exams? More interesting topics? The fact that they're more accessible to the 'general public'? To me it sounds like interest in the ancient world remains strong, but it's something about the exams themselves - content and provision.
It has to be said, that without Classical Civilisation and Ancient History at GCSE and A level, many Classics Departments in schools would likely not exist.
Under the former Minister for Education, Michael Gove (2010-14), Classical subjects (Latin, Classical Greek, Ancient History, and Classical Civilisation) were swept up in qualifications changes alongside every other discipline. Gove's rationale was clear: to increase “rigour,” following the view that qualifications had declined in difficulty and they had become devalued in the eyes of employers and universities. Yet for many working in Classics, this premise was far from convincing. Arguments from subject bodies and many academic experts that existing qualifications were already appropriately demanding were ignored.
There are echoes of the original Baker reforms of 1988, where a concerted appeal by the Classical Association and others fell on similarly deaf ears. Those reforms led to a catastrophic decline in the number of pupils taking Latin over the next decade from which it has never recovered.
I should write a book about this....
Instead, the Govian reforms were driven from the centre. The process itself was unusual: limited consultation with classroom teachers or university specialists, and a reliance on a small, handpicked advisory group. Examination boards were instructed not only to design assessments but effectively to choose the material they were going to assess. Compared to earlier, more collaborative approaches to curriculum development - and to models still used in other countries - this represents a somewhat insular way of working.
I'd say it was deeply unhealthy.
Prose Composition and the Illusion of Rigour
Perhaps the clearest example of this approach was the treatment of prose composition in Latin and Classical Greek. Historically, prose composition had existed as an optional element at GCSE: widely taught, but rarely chosen in practice by students, who tended to opt instead for comprehension questions on unseen passages. Many teachers taught it, but the dirty little secret was that their students in the exam often opted for the alternative: the comprehension exercise.
The Govian reform process initially focused on increasing the length of set texts, on the assumption that this would make learning harder by preventing rote memorisation. It's rather cute that the members of the Department for Education thought that extra rigour could be achieved by making the subject material slightly bigger. Did they also think that teachers had plenty of time already to gently mull over a few lines of Virgil in GCSE? When teachers pointed out there was limited teaching time available even for this amount, this approach shifted. Prose composition was reintroduced more firmly - despite longstanding evidence that student uptake had previously been low enough for examination boards to withdraw the option altogether.
Simplistic - prose composition reintroduced instead of more set texts - for the purpose of 'rigour'.
What was presented as an increase in rigour amounted to a reconfiguration of assessment rather than a meaningful enhancement of learning. In many ways, it felt like a solution looking for a problem.
Laughably, the Department for Education, surprised by teachers' anxiety about prose composition, rowed back a little and provided an alternative option to prose composition (short, grammar questions) and (I kid you not) actually reduced the length of the GCSE set texts even further to accommodate them.
Never mind that one of the things pretty much every Latin teacher agrees on - that the purpose of doing Latin is to read and appreciate original Latin literature - had now been cut back; it has now been replaced by something that few people like doing, served almost no purpose in achieving the reading and appreciation of original literature (except very tangentially, if you squint enough and the light is behind you), and takes up loads of time from the timetable allocation that most teachers have by now succumbed to.
They had taken away the thing that was the point of learning Latin, and replaced it with something else to show that learning Latin could be made 'hard'.
Examination Boards and Unintended Consequences
The reforms also placed examination boards in a complex and contradictory position. OCR was tasked with both shaping the overall structure of the reformed qualifications and designing its own specifications within that framework. Poacher and gamekeeper, as it were. Meanwhile, WJEC/Eduqas, having previously created alternative qualifications that appealed to a broader range of schools, was required to retrofit its courses to align with OCR-led GCSE reforms.
AQA, whose specifications had often been seen as more accessible for students in non-selective state schools, withdrew from the field altogether. Its disappearance was widely felt. WJEC/Eduqas moved to occupy this space, adapting its offer to meet regulatory demands.
The overall effect was fewer exam boards than before, a smaller range of specifications, and competition for an already limited pool of centres. Ironically, this may have led not to increased rigour, but to a narrowing of pathways and a system shaped as much by market pressures as by educational principles.
The Real Issue: Participation
If there is one area the reforms failed to address, this is the most important: participation.
The central challenge facing Classics has never been whether the exams are sufficiently difficult. It has been how to encourage more students to take them. While there have been modest investments in teacher training and some supporting materials, these efforts have been limited in scope and ambition.
What was missed was a more fundamental question: do the qualifications themselves encourage or discourage uptake?
What Might Have Been
There were clear opportunities to rethink the shape of assessment in ways that could broaden appeal and relevance. For example:
• Coursework could have allowed sustained engagement with texts and ideas
• Creativity might have opened up interpretative and imaginative responses
• Collaboration could have reflected how students actually learn
• Communication might have prioritised clarity and engagement over technical precision alone
• Connections could have drawn explicit links between ancient and modern worlds
Instead, the GCSE has become increasingly introverted. It's a qualification that serves primarily as preparation for A Level. It doesn’t attract enough in the first place, and it turns off many of those who have taken it. In turn, A Level has become ever more narrowly focused as preparation for university study. So few take the subject, that it has been withdrawn in many schools. As a preparation for university study of Classics, it has failed in its brief: it does not deliver students, and it fails to introduce them, in my view, for the richness of the university Classics experience itself - which is way more than the writing of proses, the translation of Latin, and the study of a small number of extracts from canonical works of literature.
It doesn't act as a pipeline. It acts as a blockage.
The difficulty is not all about 'rigour'. The difficulty is, for most students, that the traditional university pathway that GCSEs and A levels in ancient languages used to provide barely exists because too much tinkering with the bits and pieces has failed to notice that its made the pipe itself jammed and broken.
And the Govian knot is that OfQual rules prevent its unjamming and fixing.
A System Under Strain
The consequences are now becoming visible. Recruitment is stagnating. The Gove-inspired re-grammarisation of language qualifications and the reduction in alternative pathways are limiting access rather than expanding it.
We are therefore left with a difficult question: do we actually want more students studying Classics at school?
One answer is that current numbers, though small, are sufficient for university provision; shortfalls can be made up elsewhere. But this leaves schools in a precarious position. In schools, viability depends on numbers. If classes are too small, they do not run. This is already happening with A Level provision across parts of the country, including, increasingly, within the independent sector.
Once A Level disappears, the rationale for GCSE inevitably weakens. And in many areas, particularly those with 11–16 schools and sixth-form colleges, Latin and Classical Greek A Level is effectively unavailable outside the private sector.
Precarity and the Future
What emerges is a system that is fragile. The reforms, intended to strengthen qualifications, may instead have contributed to a narrowing of access and a stalling of growth. The risk is not immediate collapse, but gradual erosion.
If we are serious about the future of Classics in schools, the focus needs to shift. Not towards ever-greater “rigour” in a narrow sense, but towards access, inclusivity and sustainability.
Because without sufficient students, there is no subject - however rigorous its exams may be.
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