School book banning escalates in the UK as Greater Manchester secondary school censors scores of books
https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2026/03/school-book-banning-escalates-in-the-uk-as-greater-manchester-secondary-school-censors-scores-of-books/
Posted by Happytallperson
28 Comments
The book that kicked this off, ‘The Men Who Hate Women’ by Laura Bates, is absolutely essential reading for 16 year olds in my view – far more so than the Netflix series ‘Adolesence’ or Theroux’s ‘Manosphere’ documentary.
Anyone who claimed ‘Why I am no longer talking to white people about race’ is racist is either wildly unprofessional, lazy and incompetent, or an active racist who doesn’t want children reading about why racism is bad.
I’m guessing it’s the ‘free speech’ crowd doing this.
STOP COPYING THE US! You’re dragged us down to their level.
really hard to know what happened given everything including the school is anonymous, but Terry Pratchett?
The school banned the Da Vinci Code (and, it seems, every other Dan Brown book). Bless their cotton socks.
This is what happens when standards are eroded and your institutions become captured by idealogical trash.
Is it reverse psychology?
”we are banning these books, you can not read them! Do not get them in your own time we forbid it!”
book sales skyrocket
It’s impressive they stocked a lot of those books to start with. I wonder how suitable Stephen King and Game Of Thrones is for 15 year olds, but if that’s what sparks some kid’s love of reading…
Why aren’t Ofsted all over this? Triple Ofsted inspections for any head teacher that censors their library!
If a kid is old enough to read and understand the book- they’re old enough to read the book (within reason)
ACADEMIES are THE WORST thing that happened to education in the UK: private companies, especially CHURCH / Religious “companies”, should not have the power to censor education in this way: can you imagine being an english teacher for this chain? unbearable. & so short-sighted. but deliberate: OH SO deliberate because it’s all ideological, fundamental radicalism, deciding what art & literature’s “acceptable” or not to be challenged by & learn from. damn ideological hegemonies.
Nice tactic to tell kids what not to read, when they can just go search it out on their time outside school just to see what the big deal is if nothing else.
tf kinda school library is stocking George martin, tokyo ghoul , death note and Black buttler.
did a student librarian make this list ?
I wish I knew who was funding this behaviour – I do not believe it is a spontaneous uprising of little authoritarians – whether it be book banning, racism, the campaigning outside abortion clinics… all of it smacks of some kind of foreign interference that needs to be identified and neutralised as this is getting ridiculous and the USA is showing very clearly what happens if we let this stuff pass.
Laura Bates is a fantastic author, every book I’ve read of hers has been thought provoking and very well written. How can kids develop free thought if you’re restricting what they can read and critically engage with?
Book banning shouldn’t even be a thing.
It’s regressive and controlling and no parent has a good argument for it (unless maybe they’re arguing that erotica is not appropriate for a primary school…).
Secondary schools should have no books limited whatsoever. None.
Parents who start campaigns to ban anything should be tarred and feathered by their communities.
Every parent should take their kid to their local library and check out these books.
> In one of the documents seen by Index, the school admits that the categorisations of the books were written using AI, writing: “Although the categorisation was generated using AI, I consider this classification to be broadly accurate.”
Using AI to pick which books books to ban. Wow. Just, wow.
Never heard of the book mentioned, but I firmly believe if it’s printed and it’s in demand, libraries should stock it.
I mean for gods sake when I worked in a library there was a copy of Mein Kampf. I don’t know what’s in the book “Men who hate women”, but I am willing to bet it is nowhere near as bad as Hitler’s autobiography.
I understand it’s a school library, but if our educational institutions are not places for free thought then what are they? We say critical thinking is on the down but being exposed to a range of ideas is important to develop that skill.
As a parent of teens I would be kicking off about this.
An abuse of ‘safeguarding’. Some religious maniac or other extreme sort is imposing their will over a school or its run by cowards who want to appease the local nutters. This should trigger a full inspection. A few years ago schools in Birmingham had attempts to replace their staff with Islamic nutters who would likely effect the changes like this book banning and removal of a librarian.
I was looking through the list thinking they must all be extremist books. Twilight? The Da Vinci Code? Absolutely absurd!
Twilight? Really? It’s incredibly tame, especially when it comes to sex considering the author is a Mormon. And I don’t remember anything in Morganville Vampires that’s inappropriate for teens – that’s literally the target audience.
I will day I’m surprised Alchemised was in a secondary school library, from what I know it’s not a YA book.
I did teacher training for a while before I came to my senses and one of the novels that year was The Color Purple. The school I was in sellotaped certain pages together so the students couldn’t read the ‘rude bits’. That was also in the north albeit in the 90s.
How have we arrived with the dumbest people on the planet making these idiotic rules for the rest of us.
There is no era where banning books has been a good thing and ‘the right’ have measurably been on the wrong side of history as far back as you care to look.
Whatever the content of any book, its *how* its interpreted that matters.
These simpletons think every book ever written is a factual guide to life, which to be fair is how we’ve ended up on a planet with a terminal religious cancer.
But the bible won’t be banned for saying openly stating that women are inferior, having clear instructions on slavery and actually stating that women and children can be kept as a reward for war once you killed every man in town, amongst the MANY other obviously heinous stories and instructions.
I cant believe I havr to share this timeline, half the population are literally smooth brained cavemen.
I can see an argument that certain books might not be suitable in a school library, but I’d personally imagine that list of books being very small, and I can’t think of any real world examples, maybe something that glorified drugs etc but then I doubt that would be the sort of stuff stocked in a school library to start with.
I’ve not heard of most of the stuff listed in the article so I can’t comment on the content of those, but I don’t see why 1984 would be thought of as unsuitable for a school.
Horrible. Very disappointing she decided to resign. If she had gotten the right advice she would likely have been able to stay.
the librarian in question can never work in a school again due to the procedures taken by the school against her. horrifying
Wonder how many of these people frothing at the mouth over books discussing misogyny are the same people who pop up whenever immigration is discussed to tell us how Muslims don’t support free speech and hate our liberal values
Sick of illiberal bigots cosplaying as liberals only when it can be used as a stick to attack whatever group they dislike and then otherwise trying to drag the country back to the 1970s.