Year 11 and Year 12 students awarded GDST Pearson & Silver award for Classics

We’re pleased to announce that Year 11 student Anyaa and Year 12 student Maddison have been awarded a GDST Pearson and Silver award, recognising their passion and dedication to studying Classics.

The award recognises enthusiasm and academic excellence in studying Classics across the GDST. All students at GDST schools are eligible to apply, and the winners are financial contributions towards studying a course with classical content.

When asked about what motivated her to apply for the award, Anyaa said ‘I really enjoy studying Latin and learning about Classical Civilisation. I wanted to take the opportunity to further my knowledge and meet more like-minded people. Much of the work I have done in Latin has been on language. I found this really fascinating because of the way sentences can be structured. Finding out about different suffixes and prefixes helped me to understand where words in English came from. I was awarded an Academic Scholarship in Latin for Sixth Form; I chose to do this exam in Latin because it is a subject I enjoy and translating Latin texts into English feels almost like second nature to me.’

To maximise her scholarship, Anyaa plans to attend a summer school, she said “This camp will be useful to provide me with the understanding which will help for A-level Latin when I start this course next year. After A-Level I would like to apply for Law at university, where the Latin I will have studied will be very helpful to me since it is used in many legal terms. I am also interested in doing a Latin course or Classical Studies degree, so Latin will be useful for any of these. I know that attending this summer school will help to further my knowledge and fuel my passion for this subject which is why I applied for the award.”

Maddison said 'I’m proud to have been awarded a Pearson award from trust this year. I am using the money to attend a Latin summer school program in Harrogate for two weeks over the summer. This prize is greatly facilitating that, and I am excited to explore more Latin beyond the curriculum, as well as meet more like-minded people of a similar age and learn from a brilliant program of guest speakers.

My own love for classics and the ancient world started with the various works of fiction that I consumed when I was younger, and as other passions have come and gone, this one has not. Being able to study ancient languages in the supported school environment has allowed my passion to thrive and allowed me to go off on my own research tangents (which have led to a Classics based EPQ) and allowed me to understand that in many ways people today aren’t too different to 2000 years ago. It’s also really satisfying when you correctly translate a sentence and finally understand what the passage is talking about!'

Congratulations Anyaa and Maddison, a well deserved recognition of the commitment and hard work you have put into your studies.