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September 2024 - Education

Survey reveals that numerous UK school librarians have been asked to remove LGBTQ+ books from their collections: A recent survey by Index On Censorship revealed that 53% of school librarians they spoke to had been asked to remove LGBTQ+ books. Over half (56%) of those asked, removed the book or books in question. Titles included ‘This Book is Gay’, by Juno Dawson; ‘Julian is a Mermaid’, by Jessica Love; and the alphabet book ‘ABC Pride’, by Louis Stowell, Elly Barnes and Amy Phelps.

Index On Censorship, a nonprofit organisation dedicated to supporting free speech, conducted this research with 53 school librarians from across the UK. The survey was distributed via the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, the School Library Association, and a Facebook page for school librarians.

Findings also highlighted that more than half of the requests to remove books from school libraries came from parents of children at the school. There was also found to be a lot of self-censorship – school 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.

The survey also noted that LGBTQ+ books were not the only targets. Some schools removed Manga comic books due to concerns about the perceived sexualisation of characters and complaints regarding explicit or violent content.

Alison Tarrant, CEO of the School Library Association, said this: “The school library is the only place that deals with every single year group, every single subject and every single cohort, so by the very definition, you’re going to have some books in a school library which aren’t appropriate for some children – whether that’s GCSE curriculum textbooks not being suitable for a year seven, or whether it’s about personal development – so I think there needs to be an understanding of that.”

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