The education of a motley group of 20 young people, aged 16-18 – with nothing much in common but a failure to pick up five GSCEs at grades A*-C – is a rather more difficult assignment. But Jamie Oliver's idea in Dream School was to get his hands on these kids, however late in the day, expose them to some "inspirational teachers" and see if he could put them successfully back on the educational track – all in front of television cameras for a seven-part Channel 4 series. I was asked to take on the job of Latin teacher. This was to be the only foreign language on the Dream School curriculum. (Don't imagine that Jamie himself has a particular hankering after "amo, amas, amat"; the fact is that there is an ex-Cambridge classicist somewhere high up in the production team, with fond memories of the subject.)
Latin was to be the most difficult assignment of them all. Four lessons in a dead language taught by an unknown university professor were competing with a crash course in sailing taught by Ellen MacArthur, campaigning taught by Alastair Campbell (who took them off to some of the highest seats of power in the land) and photography with Rankin. The verb "to be", as taught by Mary Beard, isn't quite on a par.
So why take it on? The truth is, I didn't feel I had much choice. I spend a lot of my life banging on about how important it is to get Latin back on to the school curriculum. It would have been cowardly to refuse this chance to try it out. Besides, a Jamie Oliver series might bring Latin to a different kind of audience. You can make excellent documentaries about the ancient world, but by and large it's those already converted to classics who will switch on. Dream School is likely pick up viewers who would never think of watching a programme about the Romans.
But, of course, I had huge reservations too, For a start, there was vanity. Put yourself in the hands of a reality-TV production company, and the risks are obvious. I didn't want to end up looking like the Ann Widdecombe of Dream School (and not having seen any episodes yet, I am still hoping that I don't). I was also afraid that the programme would end up as a scarcely veiled attack on the teaching profession. Was the message going to be: regular teachers had failed these kids, but a load of entirely untrained celebrities and academics could set them right again?
In fact, that fear proved groundless. Unless something very odd has happened in the editing process, I am pretty confident that the series will be a great advertisement for the teaching profession and its skills. The first thing that almost all the untrained celebs said to me when we met at the school was: "Doing this really makes you admire proper school teachers."
How then did I find it? Well, discipline was a real issue, and not one that I'm used to. It's not that students at Cambridge hang on your every word. Far from it. But they are a bit older than the Dream Schoolers and have learned the fine art of passive disobedience – sitting on the back row of the lecture, texting their friends and simply hoping to avoid detection. The kids in my class (and in others, I heard) had a more active approach to disobedience. If they didn't want to concentrate, they got up and went to the loo, fetched bottles of water, fought with their friends, or chatted loudly. My mother was a trained teacher and could shut a kid up with just a single steely glance. I couldn't.
I'm not sure, actually, how far this kind of behaviour reflects what normally goes on in schools. The presence of the cameras must have had an effect. I don't mean to imply that the production company was constructively encouraging a rumpus in order to make good television. I certainly never saw any provocation. But we all – both pupils and teachers alike – have internalised the essential ground rules of reality TV. The Jade Goody principle is that no one gets noticed by being quiet, or by doing what they are supposed to do. So David Starkey walked determinedly into his on-screen strop about the kids' behaviour, and picked up top billing at the same time. And the kids themselves, even if they weren't quite aware of it, were at some level vying for the cameras' attention. Bad behaviour was one way of getting it – happily not the only way, as the YouTube clips of some intently engaged young faces attest.
As for the Latin, I set myself some pretty limited goals, to give myself a decent chance of coming out ahead. First, I was going to teach them some hard-core Latin language, not just the fun bits. It wasn't going to be all gory tales of gladiators, with some baths and banquets thrown in (though I did start off, I confess, with David Beckham's Latin tattoos, and later on we watched a bit of Life of Brian). That turned out to be less difficult than I thought. People who worry about British schoolchildren knowing no English grammar may be relieved to know that these kids had a pretty good, even if a rather passive, knowledge of the basics; and we successfully bolted the Latin on to that.
Second, I was going to make sure that by the end of the course, at least one of them would have read a snatch of real Latin literature written by a real Roman (not spoof Latin made up by me). I carefully chose a two-line epigram by the poet Martial, the one famously translated into English as: "I do not love thee Dr Fell, the reason why I cannot tell . . ." And no fewer than eight of them stayed behind after one lesson and read it, with only a little help from me. Huge congratulations all round (and one of them, I am delighted to see, has put this achievement on her online CV).
What I hadn't expected was how keen many of them were on etymology and where English place names came from. The idea that the word "ambulance" comes from the Latin word to walk, "ambulare", proved particularly intriguing, as did the fact that the months July and August were named after the first two Roman emperors, Julius Caesar and Augustus. And I don't think many of them will forget that English towns ending in "-chester" or "-caster" (Manchester, Doncaster etc) were once Roman forts, going back to the Latin word castra, or "camp". It's what, in the trade, we call the "culturally empowering" effect of knowing Latin.
Roman numerals were quite a hit too. After all, as they pointed out to me, you don't just see them on clocks. Without understanding Roman numerals, you can never tell when a movie or television programme was made, because that's how the date is given in the credits.
Out of all this, two particular moments stand out – neither of them, in fact, Latin related. The first was in my last scheduled class. I decided to ask them directly about discipline. What did they think I should do about classroom order? There was nothing touchy-feely about their response. First they insisted that I should not give even a glimmer of a smile when I was telling someone off (they had rightly detected that I didn't take the whole thing entirely seriously). Then they were strong advocates of exclusion. If someone was playing up, throw him or her out of the class. But how, I asked, would those who were excluded ever manage to get their GSCEs? They were less convincing on that.
Then, after my four lessons were over, I had three of them – Jamal, Jourdelle and Nana Kwame – over to Cambridge to meet some of my own students. I had asked the Dream Schoolers at one point what they thought people who went to Cambridge were like, and they came out with all the old stereotypes. These three took up the challenge to come and see for themselves. What was amazing was not how different the Cambridge students were from Jamie's – one lot having achieved places at the university of their dreams, the other not even having made it over the GSCE hurdle. It was how much they had in common, from popular culture to shared anxieties. They were all worried about the cost of higher education, and it became clear that that was something holding the Dream Schoolers back.
So what was my verdict? In general policy terms, I thought that quite a lot could be solved with a bit more money going into state education. Despite what some press reports have said, Jamie's kids were not "troubled youngsters" (even Channel 4 wouldn't let a group of untrained celebs loose on troubled youngsters). They were ordinary kids who for a variety of different reasons had not managed to get the bottom line of decent GCSEs. And what would have helped them most? Not, I suspect, a raft of new educational initiatives, nor any major structural reform. Just a bit more money in the system would probably do the trick – to give teachers and kids a bit of space, to fund a little more individual attention, and to pick up those who risk falling through the net.
As for my own success, did I come anywhere near to the aspirations of that Jesuit slogan? Did I change minds or get anything important across? Of course, in one way it is far too early to tell. As I told the kids, education should be playing for long-term goals not just GCSEs. In fact, I said, I would judge my teaching a real success if I heard in years to come that they had visited Manchester with their own children and had explained that it had once been a Roman fort – just as that funny old professor from Cambridge had, once upon a time, told them.
But, as every real school-teacher knows, there are some immediate and moving rewards in the job. Just this week, I had an email from Ronnie, one of the Dream Schoolers I hadn't heard from since the end of the filming. He was writing to say how pleased he was to have done the Latin. "It's something," he wrote, "that I've never experienced before and I shall never forget. Thank you, Mary."
And thank you, Ronnie. You made my week.
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