JACT Ancient History Committee Report 2004

There have been several changes in the composition of the Ancient History Committee this year. We are in the process of inviting various academics to serve on the committee and are awaiting their replies.

The Committee has reviewed and updated the reading lists for the OCR specification which are now published separately from the Subject Specifications so that changes can be made without having to go to QCA. The Subject Officer, Beth Ashby, has circulated these to centres which offer Ancient History. She produces a newssheet to centres in which any subsequent changes or emendations are published. We should like to thank individual members of the Committee and Robin Osborne for their hard work on these updates.

The main concern of the Committee this year has been the threat to the subject from OCR which in the summer of 2003 was extremely serious. There was a lack of Principal Examiners for two of the papers and a worrying shortage of assistant examiners. Terry Edwards, the Chief Examiner, worked well beyond the call of duty, and OCR pay, to keep the whole thing afloat, and all of us who teach this syllabus owe him a huge debt of gratitude.

In February at a meeting in Cambridge with all Classical subjects and OCR executives, there was a distinct feeling that the ‘bean counters’ had Ancient History in their sights. James Morwood and his Gang of Three undertook to write to centres who take the exam and other parties to rally support and to find out if the situation was, in fact, as bad as some seemed to believe. He gathered a great deal of useful information which we were able to use in our meeting with the Classical Civilisation Committee and OCR in September. We are extremely grateful to him for all his efforts on our behalf. While numbers are not large, they are at present stable and increasing slightly. The Principal Examiner problem has been resolved and we hope to be able to recruit more assistant examiners and refine the distribution of papers so that people are marking their specialisms. At present OCR have said there is no danger. Until the implementation of Tomlinson, we shall not know precisely what the future holds, but the members of the Committee are considering changes and refinements to the specification which we hope will mean that Ancient History can survive as a discrete subject in the new post-Tomlinson era.

Gill Partington

Specifications

This pages contains links to the Examination Boards that offer Ancient Greek.

Ancient History Resources

Click on the resources button above for full details of the Ancient History Teachers' Notes.

Summer Schools

See this page for details of what courses are on offer.