Excellence and Difference

Before you start, if this were about grammar schools, then it would have happened a long time ago. It is, however, very much of a piece with the last Labour Government, the expression of the Labour Right’s definitive shift to the anti-intellectualism that had chosen Tony Blair over Gordon Brown in 1994. Kristina Murkett writes:

The Labour government seems determined to undermine excellence in schools. The Department for Education has announced that from February it will be terminating its Latin Excellence Programme, which taught Latin to over 5,000 pupils, as part of a cost-saving measure. The cutback comes a month after a review suggested ‘middle-class bias’ should be removed from the curriculum and that ‘high-brow pursuits’, such as ‘visits to museums, theatres and art galleries’, might be replaced with more ‘relatable’ activities such as graffiti workshops.

The decision to effectively end Latin lessons in some state schools is particularly hard to bear. Latin helps create intellectually curious, interesting and interested students; it gives them a rich interior world and the opportunity to imaginatively experience another time that is so like, and so very unlike, our own. It introduces them to new literature, history, theology, rhetoric, culture; it is brilliant at developing both logic and language acquisition. It is precisely because it is a ‘dead’ language, and therefore must be taught through its grammatical rules rather than its spoken use, that it is so useful for understanding the mechanics and structure of language in general. And if we must measure importance in terms of outcomes, then it also advances literacy: in one study Latin students advanced their English-reading age by 36 months in just one year.

The Latin schools programme was only established in 2022, but it successfully championed accessibility and equality of opportunity: it covered 40 non-selective state schools, largely in economically deprived areas, and over a third of the students were eligible for free school meals. Cancelling it mid-way through the school year seems unnecessarily punitive and disruptive: almost 1,000 of these pupils were due to take Latin GCSE in the summer, and now may no longer be able to because the government wants to recoup £4 million – a relatively small saving that will barely register in the public services black hole, but will make a huge difference to the children benefiting from it.

This retrograde decision is also deeply frustrating because it makes the so-called elitism surrounding Latin, and the classics in general, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Latin’s unfair reputation for being the preserve of the Eton-educated elite is hardly going to be challenged when, as is the case currently, less than three per cent of state schools teach it at Key Stage 3. Around 70 per cent of Classics undergraduates studying the three-year degree at Cambridge are privately educated, which isn’t surprising given that more than 60 per cent of Classics GCSE entrants come from independent schools. There is also a critical dearth of Classics teachers: not a single Scottish university offers teacher training in Classics, while only four universities in England provide it.

The more utilitarian Gradgrinds will ask why the DfE should bother when Latin offers no ‘practical’ skills. Yet this is precisely why we should defend it at all costs. Latin epitomises the pleasure of learning for learning’s sake; it is enjoyable exactly because it ‘useless’. The idea that the classics are irrelevant, impenetrable or unexciting to today’s young people is both nonsense and another example of the soft bigotry of low expectations.

In an educational landscape dominated by emphasis on STEM subjects, the Latin Excellence Programme was a rare government scheme designed to enrich rather than stifle the curriculum. It also funded trips both in the UK and abroad; surely a programme that gave disadvantaged children the opportunity to marvel at the preserved wonders of Pompeii or discover the history of our Roman baths is worth saving? It is also worth noting that, because the programme was voluntary, these students wanted to study Latin, and were not being forced to sit through a subject they disliked. Surely we should be encouraging that kind of proactive mindset?

Alas, instead the programme has been sacrificed at the altar of austerity. Of course the Labour government has inherited, to put it mildly, a difficult fiscal situation. Yet £4 million seems good value for money compared to some of the other pet projects the government has previously spent money on: £8 million for portraits of King Charles; £19 million to translate school reports for foreign-born parents; £115 million on failed free schools that closed or were never completed. Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has repeatedly said that she wants to expand opportunities for working-class children, and yet she is overseeing the closure of a programme that was genuinely academically aspirational.

I fear that Labour’s curriculum review, with its dogged focus on ‘relatability’, will only make matters worse, by fixating on students’ current horizons rather than opening new ones. The arts and the classics belong to everyone, irrespective of background, and are about transcending your place in life rather than knowing your place in life. Part of the reason private schools are so successful is because they thrive on cultural capital, and education that goes beyond examination point-scoring or churning out qualifications for the employment marketplace. Cancelling this programme at all, but particularly before the end of the school year, is a misguided, short-sighted decision, and one that only proves this utilitarian fear of excellence and difference.