Back to Latin roots
"Salve Vir! Malus! Ede Terram."
There is colourful language in the playground of Benthal primary school in Hackney, east London. It translates as "Hey man! Wicked! Eat the dust", from the Latin that is, of course.
Benthal's pupils were the first to take part in a project to bring classics to inner-city schools a year ago. The experiment has become such a success, this month it will be rolled out to 750 pupils in 20 schools in the borough.
They will learn the language of Ovid and Catullus through drama, games, stories and art. Those in primaries, for example, will make "verb flowers", with paper petals on which are written Latin verb endings.
Lorna Robinson, a former teacher at £20,000-a-year independent school Wellington College, is the brains behind the project. The 28-year-old quit her post at Wellington, concerned to do something to ensure inner-city children enjoy and learn as much from Latin as she has.
"Latin is perceived as being just for the privileged," she says. "In fact, you can look at the roots of Latin words and see how English words have been made. It really helps pupils who are struggling to learn English and with spelling."
This may come in handy. More than 50% of Hackney's pupils have English as their second language and 80% are from minority ethnic groups.
Diane Roome, headteacher at Gayhurst primary - one of the schools taking part from this term - agrees that rather than confuse pupils who may speak another language at home, Latin will help them.
"This will help the children understand the roots of the English language," she says.
Robinson has trained 15 undergraduate, masters and PhD students from University College London and King's College London to take her curriculum into schools. She has also secured funding from Oxford University, Cambridge School Classics Project and others for.
"I'm just so glad the children seem to love it so much," she says. "Sometimes the classroom door gets caught in the wind and shuts on its own. Now they call that the 'umbrae scholae' - the school ghost."
Visit the Iris project website here
