Alan Bennett swapped for Bristol bus boycott as GCSEs go on diversity drive

Alan Bennett’s The History Boys is among texts being scrapped from a GCSE English literature course to allow for a more “diverse” range of books and plays.

AQA, the UK’s biggest exam board, said three texts will be removed in the next two years.

The other texts are include Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which have been replaced to “improve the overall balance of ethnicity and gender of writers”, the exam board said.

Princess & the Hustler, a play about everyday family life set against the backdrop of the Bristol bus boycott by Chinonyerem Odimba, the Nigerian-born British writer, is among the new texts.

Winsome Pinnock’s Leave Taking, a play inspired by Ms Pinnock’s own mother who was part of the Windrush generation, and Kit de Waal’s My Name is Leon, a novel about a mixed-race boy who is on a mission to reunite his family, will also be added next year.

Orwell alive and well

Books and plays that have been retained include George Orwell’s Animal Farm, William Golding’s Lord of the Flies and JB Priestley’s An Inspector Calls.

AQA said the new works added to the options for schools to teach are part of a "broader range of revisions and reviews" the exam board is carrying out "across its qualifications to ensure they better reflect the diverse range of communities, teachers and students they serve".

The exam board said the texts it was removing were less popular with schools and each account for less than one per cent of the overall entry.

'We need truly independent oversight'

Chris McGovern, of the Campaign for Real Education, said: “Exam boards have become a vehicle for promoting politically correct orthodoxies on the nation’s children. ‘Diversity’ is code for the new religion of Wokeism which, ironically, is highly intolerant of non-woke opinion. We need truly independent oversight of exam content to ensure balance and syllabus integrity.”

AQA has established an equality, diversity and inclusion expert group to consider representation in the curriculum and assessment, and “to ensure that decisions are informed by people who represent the full diversity of society”.

Earlier this year AQA added four new plays by writers from ethnic minority backgrounds to its GCSE and A-level drama courses.

Pauline McPartlan, AQA’s head of curriculum for English, said: “As the largest awarding body for English we have the greatest influence on what’s taught in the classroom. We want to make the right changes, so we’ve listened to teachers, consulted with external experts and academics, and worked with our senior examiners to inform the decisions we’ve made.

“We’re making these changes because it matters that current and future generations of young people have an opportunity to experience a diverse, balanced, inclusive English Literature curriculum that resonates with their lives and better reflects modern Britain.”