Lord John Nash serves as chair of the board of trustees at Future Academies, a family of schools across Hertfordshire and London that was launched with the mission of broadening the horizons and improving the life chances of young people.
This article will look at Future Academies’ Latin Excellence Programme and how the learning institution’s Latin Excellence Partnerships transform both students’ and parents’ views of the language, ensuring Latin is a popular and successful subject across all Future Academies and partner schools.
Having earned a reputation as the leading front-line provider of Latin lessons in English state schools today, Future Academies places a unique emphasis on the subject, with all of its schools offering all Key Stage 3 students a minimum of 100 minutes of Latin lessons per week. Over the course of the last decade, Future Academies has developed an excellent support programme, enabling it to introduce Latin sustainably and at pace to schools in some of the most disadvantaged communities in England.
Supported by an Ofsted-Outstanding SCITT that has trained more than 40 Latin teachers from leading universities, Future Academies offers a complete, subject-specific CPD package for Latin teachers centred around building the habits of highly effective Latin teaching – based on cognitive science and linked to the learning institution’s curriculum.
In terms of GCSE entries, progress and achievements, Future Academies students thrive, performing exceptionally well; Future Academies has achieved an impressive 25% to 40% GCSE Latin recruitment rate at its schools.
Future Academies partnered with more than 40 non-selective English state schools between 2022 and 2025 to deliver the Latin Excellence Programme. In addition to increasing the proportion of disadvantaged pupils studying Latin at non-selective schools outside of London, the East of England and the South East, the scheme also improved GCSE Latin achievement in the state sector. Future Academies supported state schools to develop sustainable Latin provisions by establishing four regional hubs in the North East, North West, Yorkshire and Humber, and the South West.
Future Academies’ Latin curriculum has been developed from over a decade of experience and is tailormade to meet the demands of the state sector, championing the demonstrated impact of direct instruction in the classroom. Future Academies’ Latin curriculum is designed to ensure all pupils are supported to excel in their Latin studies, with teaching centring around a coherent body of core knowledge that has been carefully broken down and cumulatively sequenced for mastery.
Fully resourced with teacher guides and student booklets, Future Academies’ Latin curriculum is supported by a comprehensive CPD system. Partnering with Oak National Academy, Future Academies benefits from an unrivalled repository of online curriculum materials and lessons that schools across England have engaged with.
In its Latin Excellence Programme Annual Impact Report published in October 2024, ImpactEd Evaluation noted that the Latin Excellence Programme had grown considerably at the school level, with the number of academies offering Latin at Key Stage 3 increasing at an impressive 122% year-on-year rate. In addition, the report also revealed that the number of schools offering Latin lessons to Key Stage 4 students increased by 140% year-on-year, triggering considerable growth at the pupil level.
Designed specifically for state sector students with no prior experience learning Latin, Future Academies’ Key Stage 3 Latin curriculum has been expertly curated to be both accessible and challenging for all students. A grammar-translation course rooted in the principal that the best experience of Latin occurs when grammatical and linguistic precision are paired with cultural interest, Future Academies’ Latin curriculum has been praised by teachers for its lesson planning and resources, with one teacher describing the teacher guide as ‘worth its weight in gold.’
