‘They see it is living’: Durham professor’s mission to get more pupils into classics

“My business school colleagues tell me that it’s not called levelling up any more, it’s rebalancing,” says Arlene Holmes-Henderson, a Durham University professor. “I think it’s just doing the right thing.”

Holmes-Henderson is discussing her mission to help fix a problem many people don’t know or think about, though she thinks they should. She wants people to care about the classics, and for all children in the UK to have equal access to classical education, whether that’s the gladiators of Rome, or knowing your kháos from your chiasmus.

To that end, last month Holmes-Henderson opened the world’s firstdepartment dedicated to researching classics learning and teaching at Durham University.

Last year, she was instrumental in setting up an all-party parliamentary group of MPs and peers exploring all things classics, chaired by Peter Swallow, the new Labour MP for Bracknell and a former Durham classics research fellow.

Great strides have been made but it can’t be right, Holmes-Henderson argues, that pupils at private schools in the UK – 7% of the total – get good access to the classics curriculum while for the rest it is patchy. “It is certainly the case that there are fantastic state-maintained schools that have a vibrant classics curriculum. But it is a postcode lottery and that is not fair,” she says.

Pupils in the north-east of England have the worst access to classics subjects, she says, while in London and the south-east there is four times more chance of having classics on the curriculum than in other parts of the country.

Holmes-Henderson is a former secondary school teacher who is passionate about the value of pupils being taught the classics. “Classics is a subject which comes with a lot of baggage,” she says. “Some of the baggage is that it’s ‘only Latin’ and Latin is really boring because it’s a ‘dead’ language and ‘dead’ languages have no relevance or value in the 21st century. I say: don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.

“We also need to move away from the idea that the classics is a bundle of stones in a field … ‘I was taken on a school trip and all I saw was stones.’”

Her experience, based on years of research, is that teachers, parents and children are initially sceptical but soon won over when they do study Latin, for example, because so much of the vocabulary of the English language comes from Latin.

“Immediately, young people see the connection. They see it is living. They see it is a language which has a legacy and it supports their spelling, their understanding of syntax and grammar and its links to other parts of the curriculum.”

Holmes-Henderson spent seven years on a study of ancient languages in schools and the results were eye-opening, particularly among pupils on free school meals, those with special educational needs and those who spoke English as an additional language.

Traditionally, Latin was taught to the highest achievers to push and stretch them. “This study showed that actually we’ve been teaching the wrong people,” Holmes-Henderson says.

Progress has been made but there are many hurdles ahead. Days before Christmas, Schools Week revealed that the government is scrapping its state school Latin programme mid-year to cut costs, a decision that “undermines the excellent work which has been done to date,” Holmes-Henderson said.

Ancient history has had a great year in popular culture, whether it is Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II at the cinema or Netflix’s modern mythological TV comedy drama Kaos, with Jeff Goldblum as Prometheus.

Some classics writers have been sniffy. One even suggested it was wrong to make the classics sexy. Some have complained about inaccuracies in Gladiator II, such as a Roman nobleman reading a newspaper, or sharks in a water-filled Colosseum.

Holmes-Henderson loves it all and wants to work with writers, TV and film-makers at the new centre, which is called Ceres after the Roman goddess of the grain and harvest, often depicted with a cornucopia full of fruits and wheat. The idea is that there are currently green shoots of classics education but it should be “full and running over for everyone”, she says.

Ceres also stands for the Centre for Classics Education Research and Engagements; Holmes-Henderson emphasises the last s as a long sssss. “It took about a year to get the name,” she says. “There were some awful names. I’m not going to tell you what they were.”