Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, has announced plans to break down the ‘Berlin Wall’ between private and state education by training state school teachers in Greek and Latin. He hopes that this will help children in the state sector to compete for university places with their privately educated counterparts.

State school teachers who are not specialist Classics teachers will participate in a new teacher training project led by Professor Christopher Pelling, Regius Professor of Greek at Christ Church College, Oxford.

The policy comes as part of Gove’s drive to create an education system where “a state pupil being accepted to Oxbridge is not a matter for celebration, but a matter of course.” He wants standards in the state system to be so high that “when you visit you simply cannot tell whether it is a state school or an independent fee-paying school.”

Over 11,000 pupils took the GCSE Latin course last year, with over 1,000 secondary state schools now teaching the subject, but Classics is still seen as the preserve of privately-educated children.

University courses, however, have been carefully developed so as not to exclude state school pupils who may not have had the opportunity to learn Latin or Greek. The Oxbridge admissions requirement for a pass in an ancient language was dropped in the 1960s. Similarly, a four-year Classics degree at Oxford and Cambridge now caters exclusively for students who have not studied Latin or Greek at school.

Molly O’Connor, who is on the four-year Classics course at Homerton College, said: “Every year more and more universities are starting to recognise that not every student who wants to study Classics or a related subject has had the chance [at school] to do Latin or Greek.

“Because of the brilliant work the universities are doing, the fact that until two months before I came to university I didn’t have a word of Latin or Greek and had been in state schools all my life had no bearing on whether or not I was going to be able to study Classics.”