Our connections

The Advocating Classics Education (ACE) project widens access to the study of the Classical world in British secondary schools. Led by Professor Edith Hall and Dr Arlene Holmes-Henderson, the project brings together 16 university partners around the UK to support the introduction of qualifications in Classical Civilisation and Ancient History for students aged 14-18. Thanks to the national charity Classics for All, teacher training can be provided free of charge to schools.

The Classics Department works with the Iris Project to deliver the Inner London Latin Project, part of their Literacy Through Latin initiative. Every year, 5-10 student teachers are paired with a state primary schools in the capital with low literacy levels or a high percentage of children on free school meals.

Staff from the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures are engaged in a lively programme of schools’ visits. We work with schools both in the London area and beyond, and we offer a range of talks and workshops for different age groups. Recent examples include careers workshops with Year 8 pupils, talks about studying languages at university with Year 11 and 12 students, and taster classes covering a variety of historical and cultural topics from the Middle Ages to the present day.

The Shakespeare Academy was inaugurated in 2016 when, as part of the Shakespeare400 celebrations, we conducted a series of in-school workshops concentrating on GCSE set texts and a creative writing session responding to Shakespeare’s poetry. This has become an annual event, with year-11 revision workshops held at King’s in the autumn, 2-day year-10 workshops held at King’s in the spring, and year-9 in-school workshops during the summer term. The project is overseen by Dr Hannah Crawforth and managed by Dr Gemma Miller. MA and PhD students assist with delivering the workshops. We also collaborate with the Globe and the British Library. We currently have good working relationships with 10 schools, and we aim to expand our reach over the next academic year. In 2017/18 alone the English Department worked with over 400 students.

In April 2018, one of Google’s partner organisations, UpSkill Digital—an organisation dedicated to digital training and skill development to help people embrace technological innovation in the workplace—did a workshop for our BA and MA students. The two key elements covered included, a hands-on training session about implementing practical social media skills that are tailored to business ideas. More specifically, this included skills on how to define goals, measure social media marketing efforts, how to harness the power of social media to promote your business, building communities and how to increase followers. The second part of the workshop provided a basic training overview of how to use Google’s analytics and audience insights by introducing students to their management and reporting tools.