A central priority of the King’s Department of Classics is to be accessible to all talented and enthusiastic students, regardless of background.
Our undergraduate degrees including our access pathway to Classics (Greek and Latin) are designed to require absolutely no prior learning in classics, and many students arrive from schools that do not teach any kind of classics at all.
We in the Department of Classics engage in many widening participation activities, particularly with schools around London. Many of our undergraduate students, for example, volunteer with the Iris Project, teaching Latin in inner-London primary schools as part of the national literacy curriculum.
Our academic staff also engage in various projects in secondary schools, running intensive programmes introducing classics to schools that do not currently teach the subject. The photograph to the left, for instance, shows Dr James Corke-Webster of the King's Department of Classics talking to students at the East London Science School about the Roman emperor Augustus.
Additionally, we give individual talks designed to support the teaching of all classical subjects, and we are currently running a lecture series around London schools in collaboration with the charity Classics for All. Here we offer sessions explicitly tailored to support the school syllabus on subjects such as:
- Approaches to the Parthenon
- Were there really sex strikes in Ancient Athens?
- Dido in the Aeneid: the death and afterlife of a drama queen
- Embodied ambiguities on the Prima Porta Augustus
- Cities and civilisation in the world of Homer