Liz Lightfoot, Education Editor, Daily Telegraph, May 14 07

The number of state secondary schools offering Latin has more than doubled in three years following an expansion in online courses and after-school clubs, a study showed yesterday.

Latin is now available at 459 of the 4,000 state secondary schools, up from 200 in 2003.

Once the preserve of private schools, the subject is also surfacing in inner-city schools where most pupils are often from ethnic minorities.

Will Griffiths, the director of the Cambridge School Classics Project, which carried out the survey, said most people assumed Latin was taught only in the independent sector. He said it was being taught in schools in Tower Hamlets, east London, and a school in Kilburn, north-west London, where 87 per cent of pupils were from ethnic minorities.

Boris Johnson, the shadow higher education secretary, said schools should be able to offer Latin as an alternative to a modern foreign language.

"Latin is in many ways more useful as a starting point than a modern foreign language because it gives you the key to so many other languages," he said.

"People say we need foreign languages to take part in the global economy but the global language is English. If you understand Latin you can read a newspaper in many parts of the world and you find it easier to learn other languages," said Mr Johnson, who is the president of the Joint Association of Classical Teachers.

"Above all, pupils should be given the chance to learn Latin because it is a 'crunchy' subject which is the basis for an understanding of English and the key to untold riches. If you are able to compose sentences in Latin you will never write a dud sentence in English."

A pilot of the online course by the Cambridge School showed a significant increase in the number of students taking Latin at GCSE. However, more than two-thirds are from the independent sector, from where most of the A-level students are drawn.

Only one exam board now offers a GCSE in Latin and entries have dropped from 16,000 in 1988 to about 9,000. The course was set up by Cambridge University in 2000 when it was being predicted that Latin would be dead in state schools by 2017 and in the independent sector by 2030.

Despite the "fantastic job" being done by the course, Latin is "ghettoised" in independent schools, said Mr Johnson. "Classical subjects still provide a secure route into university for pupils in independent schools but they are dying out in the maintained sector, which is deeply socially divisive," he said.

Last month, Oxford, Cambridge and RSA Examinations, one of three exam groups in England, announced plans to scrap the last remaining A-level in ancient history, which is taken by about 1,000 sixth formers a year.

A demonstration against the decision will be held today outside the House of Commons at 5pm, organised by Jennifer Gibbon, the head of classics at Godolphin and Latymer School in London.