Volunteering is playing an increasingly bigger role in social services and schools both in Western settings and in the Hong Kong Chinese context. The demand for volunteers in the sector of social services is continually increasing (Sherr 2008). Little is known about the willingness of secondary school students to participate in future volunteering in Hong Kong. This study attempts to explore the phenomenon of youth volunteering through the theory of planned behavior and Personal and Social Responsibility, and identifies prior experience in community service as a main predictor of the willingness of the students to participate in future volunteering. A total of 1046 students from seven secondary schools in Hong Kong completed a structured questionnaire. Social workers, teachers, and volunteer managers could benefit from this study as they could foster students’ willingness to volunteer after graduation by actively engaging them in community service programs early on in a specific time in their life.

This paper discusses the benefits of prose and free composition following the implementation of both styles in Year 7 Latin classrooms. While prose composition is an optional feature in GCSE and A Level exams in the UK, free composition is rarely part of Latin teaching in the UK – and yet it can have benefits for students equal to or exceeding those of prose composition. Any composition is a useful diagnostic tool for grammar, but free composition seems a more enjoyable and creative experience for students. For this research, I experimented with both styles of composition and observed the teaching implications as well as the students’ reception of both.

The transition from primary to secondary school, encompassing the pre-, during-, and post-transition stages, often poses significant challenges for students on the autism spectrum. This critical period has garnered growing research attention; however, the perspectives of Australian parents on the support their autistic children receive post-transition remain largely unexplored. Underpinned by a transcendental phenomenological epistemology and Kohler’s Taxonomy for Transition Programming, we explored Australian parents’ perspectives on the support being provided to their children on the autism spectrum and how these students experience this post-transition period. Four parents of high-school-aged children on the autism spectrum participated in interviews, conducted online via Zoom. A deductive content analysis of parents’ insights revealed overwhelming dissatisfaction with the post-transition support provided to their children on the autism spectrum, particularly surrounding home–school collaboration practices and the utilisation of personalised learning. The findings contribute a much-needed Australian perspective to the limited body of research focused on sustaining support for students on the autism spectrum beyond the initial transition to secondary school.

Virtual Reality is regularly heralded as a tool which will revolutionise teaching and education, yet little research has been done into its use and, in particular, into its use with secondary school students. Through a case study of a Year 13 Classical Civilisation class this article investigates student perceptions of the use of Virtual Reality in the Classics classroom and its impact upon their learning. This study demonstrated students' positive attitudes towards the use of Virtual Reality and that it appeared to have a positive and lasting impact upon their understanding of Ancient Greek sanctuaries. The study is limited in its scale – both in terms of student numbers and time period – but it can, I hope, offer encouragement for greater use of, and research into, Virtual Reality within the secondary Classics classroom.

In the United Kingdom, especially since its re-introduction into GCSE exams by the coalition government of 2010, Latin composition attracts strong opinions. Indeed, Latin teaching methodologies altogether are highly debated. Traditional methods of grammar-translation are avoided by reading courses because of their supposed elitist nature, yet they are still used by many practitioners, and this is typically where prose composition is seen. This study investigates the use of composition in the teaching of Latin to a group of Year 7 students who usually follow a reading course, to see if writing Latin can be of any benefit to students who otherwise would not write any Latin. There is a great deal of literature on the topic, both in favour and against the pedagogical uses of composition. The aim of this study was to implement techniques from the literature into the students’ lessons, and to see what the outcomes were of this new skill.

From my experience as a student of Latin, I have always perceived the transition from studying GCSE (sat at ages 14–16) to A Level Latin (sat at ages 17–18) as challenging. As a student, I used the inductive Cambridge Latin Course textbooks, which, as a reading comprehension course, fostered an intuitive sense of grammar. This was appropriate preparation for the GCSE exam. For the A Level exam however, which features greater quantities of difficult original literature and requires explicitly identifying grammatical forms, I had to undertake a lot of independent study, in addition to bridging work. Original Latin was a definite challenge for my peers and me: unusual vocabulary, creative generic form and lapses in grammatical convention were exciting but unfamiliar. With this in mind, I sought to investigate the experience of current Year 12 students.

This study looks at the effective use of Assassin's Creed: Odyssey to teach Greek Religion at A Level. A focus of this study is to identify good teaching practice in using this tool to improve source recall as well as pupils’ ability to use these sources to support evaluation. A recent blog post on Quinquennium highlighted the potential for this game to be used as a teaching tool (Hinde, 2019), while its educational potential has also been promoted by the developers releasing a Discovery Tour version as a ‘game mode for educational purposes’ which acts as a ‘living museum’ (Ubisoft, 2021). While the development of educational tools for this franchise is fairly recent, the use of video games in education is established, with games like Oregon Trail being used as early as the 1980s (Buday et al., 2012, 259). Moreover, the fundamental ideas behind the use of video games, such as the player engaging in some form of virtual dialogue with the creator, is one which can be traced back to Vygotsky's ideas of learning as a socio-cultural phenomenon (1978). For example, by reacting to stimuli in the game, the player is engaging in a dialogue with the historian or game developer who created the initial stimulus, after which the game responds in turn, thereby engaging with the player's actions. Furthermore, the idea of reward or punishment for certain actions within an educational game is also drawing on behaviourist theories of education, whereby a pupil is conditioned via in-game tokens for recall of knowledge. Indeed, this is one of the ways in which game developers encourage game addiction (Vu, 2017, 1).

Research in the academic field of Latin and dyslexia is sparse, often outdated, and largely consists of teachers' informal observations, thus lacking empirical evidence. This mixed-methods study aims to address a gap in the literature, exploring the experiences of secondary students with dyslexia learning Latin, French, or Spanish while examining the relationships between dyslexia and examination results in those languages. After purposive sampling, semi-structured interviews with seven dyslexic students, aged 16 to 29, were conducted and 349 GCSE and IB grades, of which 51 were of dyslexic students, were collected from two secondary schools. Reflexive thematic analysis of the interviews revealed seven themes: accessibility, benefits, challenges and barriers, class size, methods and strategies, motivation, and strengths. The results of three chi-square tests showed no significant association for Latin or Spanish, but a significant association between dyslexia and examination results in French. Whereas positive learning experiences for students with dyslexia hinged on the appropriate teaching method and the perceived support rather than the language per se, higher exam achievements were also dependent on the level of orthographic transparency but not on the degree of orality of the language learnt. Future research in the field should explore the experiences and achievements of students at different educational stages and with different learning difficulties doing Latin.

The scene is Florence, Italy in 1493. The scholar and teacher Guarino of Favera is holding a series of classes for beginners in the Greek language. Few people know Greek since materials for learning it are few. We have an account of his method by Girolamo Amaseo, one of his pupils. Amaseo is one of 16 students whose ages range from youths to a 50-year old poet, and Guarino is teaching them some Iliad, Odyssey and Aristophanes each day.

This project investigated the effectiveness of a creative Latin composition exercise. Within this exercise, students built upon existing Latin textbook material, inserting their own character into an existing Cambridge Latin Course (CLC) story (CSCP, 1998). This form of exercise has links to more conventional prose composition exercises, but it also takes inspiration from exercises which use fanfiction to improve language skills (Bahoric and Swaggerty, 2015).

Transition from primary to secondary school is an often challenging milestone in the lives of all students. Although existing research provides insight into transition for students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), research that considers transition from the perspective of students with ASD and concomitant intellectual giftedness (IG) appears scant. This paper contributes to narrowing this gap by providing insight into the experiences of 21 students with ASD and concomitant IG who had already transitioned to secondary school. Data gathered from focus group discussions revealed that this particular cohort of students experienced difficulties in gaining social acceptance by same-age peers and were unequipped to meet the expectations of secondary school teachers and an increased workload, which intensified their transition experience. These findings highlight that this cohort of students requires specific preparation and support to transition to secondary school, which was not occurring.

Every textbook has its strengths, and each its own quirks and idiosyncrasies. Apart from any pedagogical concerns about the old Cambridge Latin Course textbook series, for example, was the question of how it represented problematic aspects of the ancient world, such as the role of women and the institution of slavery (see Hunt, 2016). The de Romanis Latin course (Radice et al., 2020a and 2020b), which we use at my school at Key Stage 3, takes a much more detached approach to the teaching of Roman culture, presenting its reading exercises as individual stories grouped around each chapter's centralised theme rather than as a narrative told from the perspective of one group of fictionalised characters. But difficult subjects still arise and need to be handled sensitively by the teacher – particularly given the age group (11–14) the textbook is aimed at. This paper shows one way in which this might be achieved.

This article argues that the “airlift” language often used to describe the eight hundred Kenyan students who attended US and Canadian universities between 1959 and 1963 is misleading. It assumes that the students were being plucked out of substandard education, yet these youth had received some of the most rigorous education in the world—even though it was colonial education intended to inculcate in them British cultures and mores. The students took this education seriously because they knew it would help improve their economic status as well as that of their families. These elite students were not necessarily concerned with the politics of decolonization or the nation-state, as most studies of colonial elites at the end of empire have tended to claim. They were interested in uplifting their economic status. This uplifting was in and of itself a political act—even though it was not politically motivated.

Differentiation is a key concept in the Cypriot music curriculum, last revised in 2010. This paper aims to investigate teachers’ interpretation and implementation of differentiation in their music classrooms. Interviews with Cypriot classroom music teachers and focus groups with their students took place within the context of a larger research project that investigated how elements of the Cypriot music curriculum were interpreted and applied by teachers and how this pedagogy in turn influenced students’ motivation. Interviews were carried out with eight music teachers. Differentiation, as understood and implemented by these Cypriot music teachers, differed in fundamental ways to differentiation as conceptualised in academic literature concerned with this concept. These findings may serve as a point of reflection for future professional development in Cyprus relating to differentiation and its implementation.

With regards to the latest European Recommendations, developing key competences has become an important goal of education. The purpose of this comparative study is to focus on this topic considering the teaching of Latin and Greek in upper secondary school in Italy and Spain. A multiple case study with a mixed research design was used, with 173 students and 25 teachers as participants in the quantitative part and 40 students and 18 teachers in the qualitative part. The underlined results are a) the importance of working on the learning concepts of the students of Classics, as this influences the way they study b) the teaching factors that help pupils to develop key competences are evaluation, feedback, teacher personality, interactivity and discipline. Useful paths for daily teaching and new perspectives for future research in this field are offered.

We are now in our second year of Latin teaching at Lionheart Trust and it's fair to say that it has grown substantially as an initiative. The idea to teach Latin as an extra-curricular subject grew from our very positive experience of running Classics Clubs after school for Year 7s. These clubs were based on Greek and Roman mythology, local archaeology (plentiful given we are based in Leicester, a Roman city) and a little bit of Latin. The children loved all of these experiences and we realised quite quickly that there was an appetite for greater Latin teaching.