A similar picture emerges from secondary schools. Intriguingly, despite the recurrent difficulty of securing new teachers for Latin and Greek, these two subjects are avoiding the steady decline affecting those taught through translation. While the number of students taking “classical subjects” at A Level has been around 6,000 for the last 15 years, and at GCSE around 15,000, this stability disguises some specific trends. In the last three years (2016-18), A-Level take-up for Ancient History has decreased by 23 per cent (to 577), and Classical Civilisation by 18 per cent (to 3,323). Latin, by contrast, has grown slightly (3 per cent, to 1,196); a similar growth exists for the markedly smaller subject of Ancient Greek (4  per cent, to 249). This is impressive, given that A-Level Greek is only offered by one exam board (the Cambridge-based OCR); the only other board to offer A-Level Latin is the Scottish Qualifications Authority, which in 2018 attracted only 18 candidates for Advanced Higher Latin — the same number as sat its Classical Studies exam.

Among GCSE cohorts of the last five years (2014-18), Ancient History has decreased by 28 per cent (to 901), and Classical Civilisation by 37 per cent (to 2,714, the lowest figure in a generation). By contrast, the total number of candidates for Latin (10,546) and/or Greek (1,249) is at its highest for five years, and collectively larger than it was at the turn of the century (11,494). Doubtless the growing popularity of the European Baccalaureate — a mandated menu of GCSEs that requires a foreign language is having a positive effect, now that Latin and Greek qualify as subjects. In 2018, take-up for the two other classical subjects, which do not count for the EBacc., decreased by a quarter.

What is perhaps more surprising than the enduring appeal of studying the Classics through the ancient languages is a developing demographic trend: despite this being a discipline whose civilisation was primarily controlled by men, and almost exclusively created by men, Classics has seen in recent decades a predominance of female undergraduates. The average cohort of Cambridge Classicists, for instance, has comprised 61 per cent women over the last five years. Across the UK sector, UCAS reported in 2017 that the student body for “Linguistics, Classics and related" subjects has 3.3 female undergraduates for every male. It is true that there is a general preponderance of female students in UK universities (58 per cent of the 2016-17 cohort), but it is increasingly marked in the Classics. Among younger (under 35) classical academics in the UK, women are also slightly in the majority. Such a trend seems to be replicated among British secondary schools: the proportion of women taking classical subjects at A Level has risen steadily over the last ten years, from 53 per cent (2009) to over 62 per cent (2018); for Classical Civilisation, two-thirds of candidates are female.