Banned: school librarians shushed over LGBT+ books

19 Aug 24 | Europe and Central Asia, News and features, United Kingdom, Volume 53.02 Summer 2024

In a secondary academy in England, a librarian is putting books into a box. Just moments before, they were proudly on the shelves, rainbow flags waving across their covers and words such as “queer” and “trans” shouting from their titles.

Now they are being sealed beneath cardboard and packing tape, the flags furled and titles whispered.

Emma, not her real name, was asked to remove every book with LGBT+ themes from her school library in 2023. She was given little information about the sudden need to purge the library of this content. She knew only that one parent had made one complaint about one book.

The pupils asked her where the books had gone.

“I can scarcely believe that because one book was challenged, the whole collection was removed,” she told Index.

The books were hidden from sight and, although most have now been returned to the shelves, a handful of them have permanently vanished.

Since the incident, Emma has felt nervous about buying particular books for the library, a huge departure from the initial excitement she had for creating an inclusive and diverse collection. She tentatively bought a copy of the most recent Heartstopper book – a British LGBT+ graphic novel series about young people coming of age – but has found excuse after excuse to avoid putting it in the library. She wanted to buy The Fights That Make Us, but knew that the Pride flag emblazoned on the cover would be a step too far.

“I feel frightened, intimidated,” she said.

For Emma, the only explanation for the books’ removal is an underlying homophobic attitude in the school, which she says has a Christian ethos (although it is not a faith school). A single complaint led to sweeping censorship.

Emma’s experience is just one of many that have come to light during our investigation into book censorship in British school libraries. It was prompted by a comment from author Juno Dawson – the third most censored young people’s author in the USA – who told Index in 2023 (Index vol 52.3 p66) that she had no idea whether her books were censored in the UK.

Since our interview with Dawson, we have spoken to numerous school librarians, talked to bodies which support them, sent out surveys and filed Freedom of Information requests to try to answer two questions: Are people trying to ban books in UK school libraries? And if so, are they succeeding?

In an Index survey of UK school librarians, 53% of respondents said they had been asked to remove books, with more than half of those requests coming from parents.

Of those, 56% removed the book or books in question. Titles included This Book Is Gay, by Juno Dawson; Julián is a Mermaid, by Jessica Love; and the alphabet book ABC Pride, by Louie Stowell, Elly Barnes and Amy Phelps, as well as plenty of other titles featuring LGBT+ content.

Manga comic books were removed in some schools because of the perceived sexualisation of characters, other books following complaints about explicit or violent content.

Books challenged in several schools – but ultimately not removed – included various Heartstopper books by Alice Oseman, which were accused of homophobic language, swearing and self-harm discussions. Young adult fiction also came under fire in many schools, with librarians usually able to hold firm in keeping their collections.

One was asked to remove a book for “racism against white people”. They did not comply with the request.

Our overall sample was small. Only 53 school librarians took part in the survey which we distributed via the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP), the School Library Association (SLA) and on a school librarians Facebook page. But it is not the only evidence we collected. We heard plenty of anecdotal accounts from librarians and the organisations that represent them. A CILIP survey in 2023 found that a third of librarians in public libraries had also been asked to remove books. Even more worryingly there seems to be a lot of self-censorship – librarians not supplying books for fear of coming into conflict with parents and senior staff in religious schools or those thought to have a religiously conservative student body.

Alison Tarrant is chief executive of the SLA, which helps UK schools to develop their libraries. She said her organistation was aware of attempts to censor school libraries, and that the concern was on the minds of members.

“I doubt this is a new phenomenon. And it’s probably been going on for as long as school libraries have existed,” she said. “I wonder whether it’s a symptom of the more polarised society that we’re living in now, and that’s why things have got stronger.”

Recent conversations around book bans have been heavily focused on the USA, where the American Library Association’s (ALA) latest report shows that requests for bans of unique titles increased 65% in 2023 from the previous year.

That’s 4,240 different books being targeted.

There’s a reason we know all this – the data is being collected.

In the UK, there is no equivalent to the ALA list. Stories of library censorship occasionally bubble up, but only when the story is interesting enough to hit the media.

Almost every school librarian who spoke to us wanted to remain anonymous, as they were concerned about losing their jobs if they spoke out. We’ve changed their names and left out other identifying details of their stories.

But there was one who was happy to put her name to her words, as she has done before. The first time Alice Leggatt spoke out on censorship, she wasn’t given a great deal of choice, as the story surrounding the school she was then at hit the media.

Outside influence

Leggatt had been working at The John Fisher School, a Catholic boys’ school in Purley, London, for around nine months. She loved the school, and felt it was going to great lengths to be inclusive, although she now reflects that more traditional members of staff and the archdiocese were less progressive.
When she booked children’s author Simon James Green to give a talk in March 2022, she never imagined it would cause a problem. She sent a letter home to parents about how they could buy Green’s books ahead of the visit if they wished to do so, also noting that the event would continue on from LGBT+ History Month celebrations and mark World Book Day.

“Somehow, that letter made its way to a blog that was posted in Scotland – quite a far-right Catholic blog,” Leggatt told Index.

That blog was Catholic Truth Scotland, which is now accessible only through web archives. It published Leggatt’s letter, along with a call for the event to be cancelled and details of who to contact.

The anonymous blog editor described Leggatt’s letter as shameful and the event as scandalous, writing: “Cancel culture is all the rage now, so let’s not waste time in following this ‘fashion’; this is a very serious matter and I’ve already heard the opinion expressed by one parent that for any Catholic school to organise such a blatant promotion of the LGBT+ ‘lifestyle’ is tantamount to child abuse.”

The school chaplain sent letters to parents encouraging them to boycott. According to Leggatt, some parents withdrew their children from the talk, although others sent supportive messages.

“And then it came out that the diocese that week had instructed the school to cancel,” Leggatt said. The school refused.

The governing body held an emergency meeting on the Saturday preceding the Monday event, where they voted to continue with the visit. And then the situation stepped up a gear.

“On Sunday evening, I got the call from my manager to say that the diocese had fired the entire governing body,” Leggatt said. The visit was cancelled.

“I think it was a shock to many of us that the diocese used that power and did in fact have that power.”

A joint statement came out from the SLA and CILIP, and school staff went on strike. But the visit did not go ahead.

Schools watchdog Ofsted visited the school for a snap inspection and its report criticised the archdiocese’s attempts to remove the school governors and praised the headteacher for his handling of the events.

In an article in our summer 2024 magazine, out now, Green describes how the debacle impacted him as an author.

“I know from other librarians who work in faith schools that the behaviour of that archdiocese was considered to be unusual. Generally, there’s a kind of softly, softly approach to these kinds of things,” said Leggatt, who left the school. And with other books in the library dealing with much more challenging topics – such as teen pregnancy and drugs – the only issue around Green’s books, as far as she saw it, was gay relationships.

“What I’ve since found really interesting, looking at the progression of what happened, is how closely it mirrors what is happening in the USA,” she said. “It was the same arguments, the same shifting goalposts, and the fact that the initial complaint came from a group completely unconnected to the school.”

As one of the only named censored school librarians in the public sphere, other librarians have contacted Leggatt about their own brushes with censorship. She says around 20 people have told her their experiences, and all the issues have stemmed from books about sex and gender. Something that often connects these stories, she says, is that everything is quickly hushed up. Experienced librarians are telling her that this is a new phenomenon, unlike anything they’ve seen before.

And she is also concerned about self-censorship because librarians are nervous. Some 89% of respondents said they were at least a little worried about the potential for censorship in our survey with 30% saying they worried a lot.

A series of minor acts

Green’s very public cancellation is not the only censorship that has happened in school libraries. One librarian told Index that in a private school with a Christian ethos, a senior member of staff removed all Philip Pullman books without explanation. When pupils asked her where they could find His Dark Materials, she trotted out the line that the school didn’t have them.

“It made you feel disempowered,” she said, adding that she felt that the knowledge and experience she held as a librarian was disregarded. “At the time I needed that job and wasn’t in a position to ruffle any feathers.”

Louise, who works in a library service providing books to a range of schools, was asked by one to swap books with LGBT+ representation for different titles. Although she didn’t want to, she was left with no choice but to comply.

She described how she worked in a predominantly Muslim area, where senior staff were not from the same background, and took pro-active steps to avoid confrontation.

“We’ve all seen what happened in Birmingham,” she said, referring to the months-long protests outside a primary school in 2019 against the teaching of LGBT+ relationships. “No one wants to be like that school.”

At some schools, she doesn’t bother offering particular books in the first place. “If I’m buying for a school, I have to consider carefully how much the headteacher will back me,” she said.

“Over here in the UK, it’s soft censorship. It’s easy in the USA – they have this handy list.”

Amy lost a job over her refusal to censor a book which was perceived to be about LGBT+ issues. At first, the headteacher told her a couple of parents had complained about the book, and then came a written complaint from a conservative Muslim family. Amy argued that talking about equality was part of her remit as a librarian, and that the school should not assume the rest of the Muslim community would have the same reaction.

She was blamed for the upset, and for making the book available. She was asked to leave.

“What I draw the line at is when that school says that no child can see that book because one parent has written a complaint,” she said.

She was supported by senior members of staff and others, but she lost her position regardless.

In another school, a parent suggested that a specific book be restricted to older children, and Amy was happy to oblige. But the decision was made that the book should be removed completely.

“It seems that when it comes down to it, if a parent complains, the book’s gone,” she said.

Another anonymous school library service worker, who we’ll refer to as David, said that his organisation received complaints about LGBT+ content from all faiths, and explained that while headteachers were generally supportive, they haven’t got the tools to formulate a defence.

He told Index that policies from groups such as CILIP and the SLA made no impact without a supportive school, describing a landscape where headteachers wanted to take the path of least resistance to shut down complaints. That usually means censorship.

“It’s a very small minority of parents, sometimes just one or two, who want to kick up a fuss because they basically say for whatever reason, whether it’s personal, social or religious, ‘I don’t want my child accessing this content’.

“And it’s trying to get that message out saying, ‘OK, you don’t want your child accessing this content, but you can’t shut it down for everyone else,’” he said.

“I think people are worried about upsetting certain groups,” he said, explaining how there are some Muslim and Christian parents in his area who don’t want their children exposed to LGBT+ characters. But, he stressed, these groups are not homogenous.

“We haven’t even got a central government that’s going to address this,” David said, speaking in April 2024 before the election was called. “What we’ve got is a political climate where they’re stoking these fires.”

He described a librarian he knows in a private school who is handing out “off-the-record loans” from a back cupboard.

“There’s nothing inappropriate. It’s just stuff that they know the parents will disagree with,” he said. In another private school, a parent tried to get a librarian sacked because their child had been reading an LGBT+ book.

In some cases, the censorship is more subtle. The SLA told Index that it has had reports of senior staff having a quiet word with librarians, telling them to keep particular books on the shelves but not to include them in displays.

“It also very much puts that librarian in a difficult position, because the children who need those books are only ever going to get them if they’re directly signposted to them,” the SLA’s Tarrant said.

Gwen works in a school library service, supporting around 420 schools. She said that most of the book challenges the service faced were from secondary schools, and were usually based on the label given to a book or its content.

On one occasion, when it was running a book award for Year 8 pupils (12 to 13-year-olds), it was challenged on the inclusion of some books, including one with a minor LGBT+ element. One secondary Catholic school decided not to give that book to its students.

That same school refused to have a book which promoted open conversation around menstruation.

“Probably more of the challenges may come in from our Catholic secondaries,” Gwen told Index. “And we still have some Catholic primaries who don’t have Harry Potter and books like that on their shelves.”

But, she explained, the service has a robust policy, and encourages schools to do the same. It also runs seminars on how to tackle censorship attempts.
“I think it’s just slight challenges,” she said. “I think parents are challenging schools more and more about lots of different things. So, it isn’t just censorship.”

Gwen isn’t as worried about censorship as some of the other library professionals we spoke to.

“I think it’s just so that we’re not leaving some poor, single-staffed library person to deal with any challenges that come in, that we give them all the tools to be robust in any answers,” she said.

As well as surveying librarians, Index sent out FOI requests to a selection of schools. One Catholic school in Coventry confirmed that its headteacher complained to the local school library service about a handful of books which contained “inappropriate language and didn’t support the Catholic ethos of the school”.

The four titles contained themes of crime and the supernatural. They were replaced with different books.

Another – a comprehensive boys’ school in London – told Index that a pupil had requested the removal of Salman Rushdie’s books, but that his request was refused.

The school library service in Milton Keynes works with primary schools. In response to an FOI request, it told Index that it had never had a book rejected by a school but had received negative feedback about a children’s picture book of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales by Marcia Williams, owing to an abundance of “naked bottoms” and other bawdy content. It added: “It is also worth noting that it tends to be the faith schools that do have higher standards, or are more censorious,” later adding that it avoided sending books about witches and wizards or with anti-faith themes to Catholic schools.

Several schools and school library services claimed they had not had book-challenge experiences. Many others failed to respond to the FOI requests.
Ofsted said it had found no evidence in inspection reports of censorship in school libraries since April 2021, although it also acknowledged that the automated search method meant this was not a guaranteed result.

A spokesman said: “It is for schools to decide what they include in their own curriculum, within the requirements of the law and the Department for Education (DfE).” He added that a good curriculum must ensure “that pupils understand, appreciate and respect difference in the world and its people, as well as engage with views, beliefs and opinions that are different from their own in considered ways”.

Nick Cavender, the chair of CILIP’s School Libraries Group (SLG), told Index that school librarians had always been aware of censorship.

“I don’t think we are at a stage where we can see any particular patterns,” he said. “But as professional librarians we need to bear in mind our duties to promote intellectual freedom and oppose censorship, while at the same time making sure that our collections meet the needs of our users – the school community.”

Top-down attitude

Like Leggatt, David said that every complaint he had heard, bar one, had stemmed from books with LGBT+ themes, and that it had escalated in the last couple of years. He said that the government’s attempt to ban gender identity discussions from sex education has had an impact on his conversations with schools.

“Some schools, for example, have said, ‘Well, we can’t have books that discuss LGBT characters, because that links to sex education, and therefore we can’t have that in primary schools’,” he explained.

While the USA has an organised system of book challenging, spearheaded by chapters of right-wing Christian groups and politicians, the librarians who spoke to Index haven’t seen anything particularly organised in the UK – although David does have concerns about the influence of agitator groups who protest drag queen story time in libraries, and he said they “seem to be getting their scripts from the American playbook”.

On online forums, book-banning sentiment is inseparable from the culture wars around sex and gender. In one Mumsnet thread, a user seeks guidance in drafting a complaint about the book She’s My Dad due to the links with gender identity, later adding: “I’m really looking for experiences and complaints about this book/author, and how to write to ask for it to be removed/immediately stopped being used until a parent consultation has gone ahead.”

There are dozens of replies. Some offer advice, others cry “inappropriate content”, and others argue that teaching the book is a political move.

The Safe Schools Alliance UK (SSA), a group which describes itself as “a grassroots organisation which campaigns to uphold child safeguarding in schools”, ran a review of Juno Dawson’s young adult novel Wonderland, beginning: “We had our ex-English teacher reviewer read it so that you – and your kids – do not have to.”

The review was less than favourable. Out-of-context scenes are plucked from the book, peppered with dismissal of protagonist Alice’s gender identity and accusations of “male sex fantasy tropes” and the “reckless statements Dawson plants in Alice’s mouth”.

Another group, Transgender Trend, which uses the strapline “No child is born in the wrong body”, has published a lengthy essay on “trans picture books for little children” and describes some of them as “militantly activist”.

A number of school librarians also told Index about FOI requests their schools had received.

They ask about LGBT+ material in their schools and whether those books are being used to “encourage the acceptance” of transgender identities. The feeling from librarians is that the FOIs are sent to be an agitation.

A censorship-free future?

Having worked in school libraries for a long time, David believes a recent uptick in complaints is related to the wealth of available LGBT+ material that wasn’t around before – a sentiment echoed by others.

He wants to see a top-down approach, a central message so that headteachers know they will be protected. Others want to see professional bodies taking the problem more seriously and libraries becoming statutory.

Many of the librarians who spoke to Index reported feeling on their own. Tarrant said the SLA had training and an advice line, but would also be reflecting, following Index’s investigation, to consider how it can increase support.

“I would urge anyone going through a situation to pick up the phone and call us or to reach out on socials,” she said.

Cavender said that CILIP members could also seek support from the SLG, adding: “It can be difficult as a school librarian as we work within schools and we have to be mindful of the culture and demographic of the school community. However, we still have obligations, such as under the Equalities Act 2010, to provide information for all our borrowers.”

There are mixed feelings from librarians on whether an ALA-style list of challenged books would help or hinder the UK’s fight against censorship.

Is it a way to shine a light on a growing problem or a ready-made list of targets for those who want to purge school libraries of particular material? For the SLA, a small national charity with six members of staff, the first problem with this approach would be the resources needed.

“I also think you’d have to have very careful consideration of what happened with that list afterwards,” Tarrant said. “I hesitate about inflaming the situation.”

She also worries about the wellbeing of authors who might find themselves on that list.

“It’s not to say that having one wouldn’t necessarily be helpful in terms of having some sort of data on how much it was going on,” she said. “But I’m not sure it’s a solution in and of itself.”

CILIP and the SLG’s position is to monitor the situation.Cavender said that having “a robust collection development plan can guide school librarians and it can help get school management on board”.

Tarrant said that the DfE position is for headteachers to make the best decisions for their schools, adding that as every school was different, there did need to be the ability to respond to local contexts. But that doesn’t help headteachers looking for advice.

In the meantime, many librarians are proactively fighting for the freedom to read. Some, Gwen explained, are looking at the lists of banned books coming out of the USA and actively choosing them for their libraries. David’s school library service puts together recommended reading, with a good cross-section of representation.

“We know that children are more likely to read if they’re reading about stories, and characters and situations, be they fact or fiction, which relate to them,”

Tarrant said. “It is about allowing all children to understand the world that they’re operating in, through imagination, through facts and through stories.”
School libraries shouldn’t be a battleground for cancel culture and librarians can’t be expected to deal with censorship by themselves. With a new UK government, it is an opportunity for Ofsted and those who represent teachers and librarians to demand an end to this pernicious practice.