Harrogate school is to bring back Latin as subject loses its 'elitist' reputation in UK's education system

Once an integral part of all schools in Britain, these days Latin is only taught at 2.7% of state schools at a key stage three level, though this figure rises to 49% of independent schools.

Now children in Year 7 and Year 8 at Ashville College in Harrogate will once again study a language which is now regarded as bringing a range of benefits to pupils in the modern world.

The school’s Head of Classics, Mark Knowles, himself an author of successful novels set in Roman times, said: “The rewards of studying ancient languages are immense, both in terms of directly transferable skills of analysis and lateral thinking, as well as softer skills of enhancing our awareness of self and other.”

One of the foundations of western civilisation and the lingua franca of most of Europe for millennia, recent decades have seen Latin languishing alongside dusty old copies of Virgil, Tacitus and Ovid.

But the tide is turning.

Pupils aged 11 and 12 at Ashville College are getting the chance to discover that Latin is the wider root of languages including French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian, and its terminology can be found in subjects such as science, medicine, and law.

In time, the independent Harrogate school hopes that reviving Latin will bring the additional benefit for pupils of a greater awareness of how Roman culture has influenced Yorkshire, where York (Eboracum) was home to the Roman capital in Britain long before London.

Rhiannon Wilkinson, Head of Ashville College, said: “Teaching of Latin has been revolutionised.

"No longer is it just a matter of conjugating verbs and the declension of nouns, but focuses on a ‘living Latin’, looking at the way the people of the Roman Empire lived.

“It leads often to the study of Classical Civilisation at GCSE and A Level which also introduces pupils to the world of Ancient Greece and many of the foundational texts of literature.”