If you missed the Woman's Hour feature on teaching Classics in state schools, you can read about it here. There is a link on that page to listen again to the item.

Links on the BBC page are also to the iris project, Friends of Classics, JACT, Cambridge Schools Classics Project, and the Classical Association. But none to ARLT.

Woman's Hour wheeled in Matthew Engel to pooh-pooh the teaching of Latin. He wanted Mandarin and Arabic instead. (This seems to be the smart thing to say nowadays.) That was a gift to Lorna Robinson, who told him that she was learning Arabic, and that her Classical training was a great help in it. If I had been on the programme I'd have mentioned that I have a qualification in Mandarin, and that it and Classics are certainly not mutually exclusive.

What do you think should be the first modern language taught in our schools? In my school it was French, with German coming later as an alternative to Greek. I have personally found German (the little I've been able to pick up in adult life) very useful in several European countries, whereas French has been useful only in France. To get around in Spain and Italy, Latin takes you two thirds of the way.