Summer School Success for Classics and the Ancient World

Students on Trinity’s bespoke schools outreach programme in Classics and the Ancient World have successfully completed their second summer school in the College.

Offering a series of study days and two one-week summer schools over two years, the OxLAT Extension Programme caters for young people at state schools in Trinity’s outreach region of Oxfordshire and beyond who have no opportunity to study Classical subjects at school and who have taken Latin GCSE via the OxLAT scheme run by the Faculty of Classics.  The Extension Programme enables these students, now in school years 11-13, to encounter the full range of advanced study in Classics and the Ancient World, including literature, ancient history, archaeology, philosophy and reception studies alongside an intensive introduction to ancient Greek and the opportunity to maintain and extend their knowledge of Latin.

This year’s summer school included lectures on Greek tragedy and on the end of the Roman Republic, and workshops on Augustan coins, Plato’s allegory of the Cave, pastoral poetry, Cleopatra, and the art of death, all taught by academic staff from Trinity and the wider Oxford Classics community.  

Dr Gail Trimble, Fellow and Tutor in Classics, said: ‘It is always a delight to teach on the OxLAT Extension Programme and to see these keen students developing their knowledge of the ancient world and their confidence in expressing their own ideas.  We know that the programme has helped its participants to get a clearer sense of what studying at university, and particularly at Oxford, might be like, and also that many of this third cohort have been inspired to apply for degree courses in Classical subjects.  We hope that some will follow those of their predecessors who are now Classics undergraduates at Trinity, and that the ancient world will have been thoroughly demystified for all of them.’

The OxLAT Extension Programme owes a great deal to Dr Peter Haarer, who played a key role in setting up and developing the programme, and to Emma Searle, the tireless Programme Administrator. It is part of Trinity’s access work, and runs smoothly thanks to the support of the College’s conference and events team and the hall and kitchen staff, whose efforts are particularly appreciated by the students.