Blab Politics
Cambridge OCR Drops Orwell, Replaces with Biography as UK Schools Shift Focus
Cambridge OCR, the examination board that sets GCSE and A‑level exams in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, announced in September that its syllabus will no longer include George Orwell’s 1933 memoir Down and Out in Paris and London. The book, which details the author’s experience of poverty in the two capitals, has been removed from the list of texts students are required to read for the upcoming exam cycle.
The board said the change is part of a broader effort to modernise the curriculum and to give students a wider range of contemporary voices. In place of Orwell’s work, Cambridge OCR will feature a biography of his first wife, Eileen O’Shaunghnessy, written by Anna Funder. The biography focuses on Orwell’s personal life and has been described by some critics as an example of a trend that prioritises authors’ gender or personal histories over the literary merit of their works.
The removal of Orwell is not an isolated incident. In 2024, the Welsh curriculum dropped the American classics Of Mice and Men and To Kill a Mockingbird from its GCSE syllabus amid concerns about racial content. Meanwhile, a Manchester school library reportedly used an artificial‑intelligence tool to identify and remove nearly 200 books it deemed “inappropriate”; among those removed was Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.
Sisa San Sebastián Hurtig, a political scientist, argues that the trend of excising Orwell’s texts does the opposite of what it intends. According to Hurtig, preventing students from reading Orwell limits their ability to understand how class insecurity can drive the rise of right‑wing populism. She points out that Orwell’s work exposes the psychological mechanisms that allow working‑class voters to turn toward exclusionary politics.
Iain Manfield, head of education at the think‑tank Policy Exchange, has warned that the growing emphasis on inclusivity and identity politics is distorting the content of GCSE and A‑level courses. Manfield says that purging works like Orwell’s in pursuit of political correctness risks overlooking the contemporary relevance of his analysis of power and oppression.
The current shift reflects a broader movement in education and scholarship that favours cultural explanations of inequality over material or class‑based ones. Critics of the change have called it an “oppression Olympics”, suggesting that the personal histories of authors are being used to justify the removal of works that offer valuable historical and political insight.
Orwell’s own writings, including The Road to Wigan Pier and Burmese Days, analyse how imperialism and domestic class tensions intersect. He argued that the British Empire served to manage class grievances at home by offering colonial status to those who could not achieve it in Britain. Hurtig and other scholars contend that these insights remain relevant for understanding today’s political climate, where working‑class insecurity has been redirected toward exclusionary narratives about migrants and outsiders.
The removal of Orwell’s texts therefore removes a key resource that could help students grasp how class dynamics shape political behaviour. While the curriculum changes are already in effect, the debate continues among educators, scholars and policy makers. No formal review of the decision has been announced, and it is unclear whether the changes will be reversed or expanded to include other classic works.
At present, students preparing for GCSEs will study the new biography instead of Orwell’s memoir, and libraries that have adopted AI‑based filtering may continue to exclude his novels. The next steps will depend on feedback from teachers, students and the wider public, as well as any forthcoming policy reviews by Ofqual and the Department for Education.
The board said the change is part of a broader effort to modernise the curriculum and to give students a wider range of contemporary voices. In place of Orwell’s work, Cambridge OCR will feature a biography of his first wife, Eileen O’Shaunghnessy, written by Anna Funder. The biography focuses on Orwell’s personal life and has been described by some critics as an example of a trend that prioritises authors’ gender or personal histories over the literary merit of their works.
The removal of Orwell is not an isolated incident. In 2024, the Welsh curriculum dropped the American classics Of Mice and Men and To Kill a Mockingbird from its GCSE syllabus amid concerns about racial content. Meanwhile, a Manchester school library reportedly used an artificial‑intelligence tool to identify and remove nearly 200 books it deemed “inappropriate”; among those removed was Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984.
Sisa San Sebastián Hurtig, a political scientist, argues that the trend of excising Orwell’s texts does the opposite of what it intends. According to Hurtig, preventing students from reading Orwell limits their ability to understand how class insecurity can drive the rise of right‑wing populism. She points out that Orwell’s work exposes the psychological mechanisms that allow working‑class voters to turn toward exclusionary politics.
Iain Manfield, head of education at the think‑tank Policy Exchange, has warned that the growing emphasis on inclusivity and identity politics is distorting the content of GCSE and A‑level courses. Manfield says that purging works like Orwell’s in pursuit of political correctness risks overlooking the contemporary relevance of his analysis of power and oppression.
The current shift reflects a broader movement in education and scholarship that favours cultural explanations of inequality over material or class‑based ones. Critics of the change have called it an “oppression Olympics”, suggesting that the personal histories of authors are being used to justify the removal of works that offer valuable historical and political insight.
Orwell’s own writings, including The Road to Wigan Pier and Burmese Days, analyse how imperialism and domestic class tensions intersect. He argued that the British Empire served to manage class grievances at home by offering colonial status to those who could not achieve it in Britain. Hurtig and other scholars contend that these insights remain relevant for understanding today’s political climate, where working‑class insecurity has been redirected toward exclusionary narratives about migrants and outsiders.
The removal of Orwell’s texts therefore removes a key resource that could help students grasp how class dynamics shape political behaviour. While the curriculum changes are already in effect, the debate continues among educators, scholars and policy makers. No formal review of the decision has been announced, and it is unclear whether the changes will be reversed or expanded to include other classic works.
At present, students preparing for GCSEs will study the new biography instead of Orwell’s memoir, and libraries that have adopted AI‑based filtering may continue to exclude his novels. The next steps will depend on feedback from teachers, students and the wider public, as well as any forthcoming policy reviews by Ofqual and the Department for Education.
