An English exam board has been accused of “dumbing down” the A-level curriculum after replacing its required non-fiction reading list with works published almost entirely within the past decade.

According to The Telegraph, Cambridge OCR, one of the five main exam boards operating in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, has overhauled the set texts for its English language and literature A-level course. The revised list, which students will begin studying from September, contains 12 books, with the oldest published in 2018.

Together, the new books have a publication history spanning just 59 years. By comparison, the previous list contained works from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, with a combined publication age of 512 years.

The changes have prompted criticism from academics and education campaigners, who argue that reducing the number of older works could deprive students of exposure to unfamiliar language, historical perspectives and ideas from earlier periods.

Michael Gove, the former Conservative education secretary, told The Telegraph that the change reflected what he described as a wider “retreat from ambition” in education.

“It’s perfectly possible to examine and to write intelligently about 21st-century texts,” Gove said, while warning that education was increasingly moving away from introducing students to “the best that has been written” in favour of material considered more accessible.

Under the OCR English language and literature course, students are required to select one non-fiction text from a list of 12 and produce a comparative essay with another book, either from the list or chosen independently.

The non-fiction component also requires students to write an original piece of non-fiction and accounts for 20 per cent of the overall A-level. Other parts of the qualification continue to require students to study writing from before 1900.

According to The Telegraph, the previous reading list, which had been in place since 2016, featured major works such as George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, published in 1933; Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave, published in 1853; and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, published in 1966.

The new selection includes Richard Flanagan’s Question 7, published in 2024 and examining Australia’s treatment of Indigenous people; Ana Kinsella’s Look Here, published in 2022 and portraying London during the Covid-19 lockdowns; and Common People, a 2019 collection of essays, memoirs and poetry featuring 33 working-class writers and edited by Kit de Waal.

The oldest work on the new list is Educated, Tara Westover’s 2018 memoir about growing up in a Mormon family in Idaho.

Critics warn of a loss of historical perspective

The revised list comes amid an existing controversy over OCR’s decision to remove Orwell’s memoir from the course in favour of Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life, Anna Funder’s 2023 biography of Orwell’s first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy.

Funder’s book portrays Orwell as a “sadistic and misogynistic” man, a characterisation that has been disputed by the Orwell Society. Richard Blair, Orwell and O’Shaughnessy’s only child, has also criticised the portrayal of his parents’ marriage. Funder has defended her work, arguing that historical truth should not be limited by family accounts.

However, critics of the new OCR reading list say the controversy over Wifedom is only part of a broader concern about the direction of the curriculum.

Dr Alka Sehgal Cuthbert, a British educator and co-editor of What Should Schools Teach?, told The Telegraph that the changes represented a major departure from the traditional model of English education.

She argued that reducing the presence of older texts risked cutting younger generations off from a “rich humanist cultural inheritance” that should be accessible to everyone.

Cuthbert also warned that students who are not exposed to unfamiliar language and ideas from earlier literature could have a more limited ability to imagine different worlds and perspectives.

“The OCR EMC A-level specification is a travesty of an education in literature and a tragedy for our culture,” she said.

Frank Furedi, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent, similarly criticised what he described as a growing emphasis on contemporary relevance.

He argued that focusing heavily on modern texts could disconnect students from the cultural legacy of the past and potentially encourage greater politicisation of English literature.

Literary critic and Mercatus Center research fellow Henry Oliver also described the decision to make the reading list more “accessible, relevant, and modern” as “self-defeating”.

Young people, he argued, already understand contemporary English and culture. The purpose of education should instead be to expose them to unfamiliar material and require them to engage with the difficulties earlier generations encountered.

Chris McGovern, chairman of the Campaign for Real Education, went further, describing the changes as a form of “dumbing down” and arguing that they reduced the breadth of choice available to students.

OCR defends the new curriculum

Cambridge OCR rejected the criticism, insisting that students studying its English language and literature A-level will continue to encounter classic texts, challenging ideas and older forms of language.

An OCR spokesman said students were required to study writing and speech from 1600 to the present day, including works by Shakespeare, William Blake, Oscar Wilde and Charlotte Brontë.

The board also pointed out that regulations introduced in 2015 require exam boards to include post-2000 texts in the subject. Students must compare one text from the prescribed list with another text of their own choice, meaning they are not restricted to contemporary works.

OCR also stressed that its English language and literature qualification should not be confused with its separate English literature A-level, which offers a wider selection of classic and contemporary works, including texts by Orwell, Jane Austen and Ernest Hemingway.

The debate nevertheless raises a wider question about what schools should expect from literature education: should reading lists prioritise texts that feel familiar and relevant to today’s students, or should they deliberately introduce young people to works, language and ideas far removed from their own time?