School book banning escalates in the UK as Greater Manchester secondary school censors scores of books

20 Mar 2026 | Europe and Central Asia, News, United Kingdom

In November 2025, a school library in Greater Manchester underwent a purge. Inspired by the headteacher’s dislike of one particular title, books were pulled off the shelves, in a case unlike any previously seen in the UK. Within weeks, more than 130 books had been targeted – nearly 200 if each issue of the numerous graphic novels is counted. The books included a graphic novel of George Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four, young adult books like Dean Atta’s Black Flamingo and Alice Oseman’s chart-topping Heartstopper graphic novel series. Black Flamingo has since been reinstated, but the fate of many books on the list is unclear.

The school leadership pointed the finger at the librarian. She was threatened with disciplinary action, labeled as a safeguarding risk and at one point she was under risk of police involvement. She resigned from her job under severe stress.

The librarian, who we have called Emily, spoke to Index in an exclusive interview, and Index has seen extensive documents to support her claims.

Emily described this period as the worst in her life. She is too scared to use her real name, or allow the school to be named. She fears that the school will try to take legal action against her and does not want to become a public figure, where she worries she may be targeted. Considering the abuse levelled at librarians in the USA for defending their collections, she may have a point.

It began with Laura Bates’ nonfiction title Men Who Hate Women, which is a book about the growing network of incels and misogynists. Emily had ordered the book for older students as a result of safeguarding training on incel culture. The school goes up to year 11, and the library has a special section for students who are about to leave school – this is where the book was housed.

Emily included Men Who Hate Women on a slide deck of recommended reading (which she says she checked with her line manager). The headteacher saw the slides, and demanded the book be removed from the library, due to the exposure of misogynistic beliefs. Ironically, Emily says no students had actually checked out Men Who Hate Women.

“I was disappointed and upset, but it was just one book,” Emily told Index.

She complied, and moved it to the staff library, which isn’t accessible to students. The headteacher was not only of the opinion that the book was too disturbing for young people, but that it could be disturbing for adults too.

The school launched an investigation. Emily says she was at her desk when she was asked to step outside by the designated safeguarding lead (DSL). The head of HR was also waiting. Emily says she was taken into a meeting.

Emily is autistic, and she described how she “always assumes that surely people will see the common sense in things”.

During the discussion with HR and the safeguarding lead she defended the importance of books like Little Bang by Kelly McCaughrain, shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal (a prize for writing for children), which deals with teen pregnancy and abortion in Northern Ireland.

“I went home that night feeling very uncomfortable and kind of knowing in the pit of my stomach that things were about to get very bad, but I had no idea quite how bad,” Emily said.

The next morning when she arrived at school, her “librarian senses were tingling”. She knew something was wrong. She knew the placement of the books in the library and could see gaps where they had once been. Books had been pulled from the shelves.

“There were comic books missing, graphic novels,” Emily said. She was soon told that the library would be closing as a temporary safeguarding measure.

“We have the exact same group of children who come in every single day, and a lot of them are LGBTQ+, a lot of them are neurodivergent, and they come into the library because it’s their safe place,” Emily said. That safe place had been removed.

Emily says she was asked to conduct an audit of the books in the library. There were three criteria for removal: books that were not written for children, books with themes that could be upsetting to children and books that could be inappropriate or constitute a safeguarding risk. No definition of “inappropriate” was provided, Emily said.

“I ended up removing biographies of World War II airmen, literally less than a week after Remembrance Day, because they weren’t children’s books,” she said. Many classics fell under one or more of these criteria.

“God help me, I cooperated because I thought ‘I’m already in a lot of trouble here,’” she said, explaining how she thought there would be the opportunity for discussion about the books.

There were plenty of books she was compelled to remove that had already been in the library before Emily joined in 2023, including Heartstopper.

“It took me all day to take about 15 to 20 books off the shelves, and it was killing me,” she remembers.

And then things got worse. The designated safeguarding lead had reported her to the local authority as a safeguarding risk due to introducing books into the school library which were allegedly inappropriate for a school setting. There would be an investigation, and there was also a case for gross misconduct.

“I was absolutely gobsmacked. When I’m shocked, I kind of shut down. So, I stopped speaking, but I remember I was stamping books or something, and I just kept on doing that because I couldn’t believe what I was hearing,” Emily said.

Emily signed off sick due to stress. In the meantime, she spoke to the School Library Association (SLA), the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) and their School Libraries Group (SLG), to get their support behind the scenes. The SLG were utterly shocked and said it is completely unprecedented. When they tried to talk to the school, they got no response.

Caroline Roche, chair of the SLG told Index that they had no doubts about Emily’s claims, and had seen the supporting evidence. Librarians all make different decisions about which books to stock, she said, and this should never be grounds for a safeguarding complaint. When it comes to books in school libraries “there aren’t any noes’”.

What the school should have done, she said, is to have a discussion with Emily about specific books and should have a library policy in place. “This is over the top. It’s ruined her career.”

When Emily contacted her union, which has helped her through the process, her local representative told her that their place of work was on lockdown due to threats from the far right.

The full list of books which the school deemed might be inappropriate was shared with Emily. The spreadsheet contains almost 200 titles. It is called the “final List of alleged books with inappropriate content” (a copy of which is pasted below).

It is unclear what has happened to the majority of these books now, and whether or not they have been returned to the library.

One report from the school states: “It appears that several books have been removed based on assumptions about potential themes or their classification as adult texts by the DSL.”

Some of the books were ordered by people other than Emily, and she says her line manager signed off on all purchases – the school claimed that was for budgetary reasons only.

Emily couldn’t help but laugh when the first book she saw on the list was Twilight by Stephenie Meyer. The reason given on the spreadsheet was “mature romantic themes, sexual tension, and violence involving vampires and werewolves.” She realised how ridiculous the whole situation was, if they were pulling a book that she’d read aged 12. She held out hope it was a misunderstanding.

There were many LGBTQ+ books on the list too, ones that were written for children and young adults. One of the books brought into particular focus was Queerly Autistic: The Ultimate Guide For LGBTQIA+ Teens On The Spectrum by Erin Ekins. The book has a recommended reading age of 12-18.

“As an autistic child, you are very vulnerable to certain predatory behaviours that you may not understand, and that was one of the reasons why I thought it was so important to have this book,” Emily said. “They were making out like I was teaching children how to perform sex acts by having this book in the library.”

Reni Edo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race was on the list too, with the reason for removal: “race, discrimination”.

The school also paid close attention to the graphic novel The Crow by James O’Barr, which Emily bought after talking about it with some Year 11s (15-16 year olds), who were interested in Goth subculture and keen to read it. She kept the book near her desk, away from younger readers, as a safeguarding measure. When students borrowed the book, she gave them content warnings, as she did for all books with challenging themes.

“There are some scenes in it that are graphic, because a woman is raped and killed. That’s the basis of the story. There’s rape in The Handmaid’s Tale, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles and An Inspector Calls and all kinds of books that we had in the library,” she added.

The SLG were given the list by Emily and added comments, before sending it back to the school as part of Emily’s argument that the books were not inappropriate. Next to The Crow the SLG wrote: “One of the best-selling independent black-and-white graphic novels of all time.”

Some of the other reasons for removal given include racism and political themes for Michelle Obama’s autobiography Becoming and “romantic drama about enduring love and memory loss” for The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks. Other reasons for removal include political intrigue, espionage and even betrayal. Terry Pratchett’s Soul Music was removed for: “Adult audience content – may include sexual material, violence, abuse, substance misuse, or psychologically distressing themes.” The SLG said none of this is true.

In one of the documents seen by Index, the school admits that the categorisations of the books were written using AI, writing: “Although the categorisation was generated using AI, I consider this classification to be broadly accurate.”

Louis Coiffait-Gunn, CEO of CILIP, told Index that he was deeply concerned about a few school leaders using these methods to work out what is acceptable or not, citing the sinister use of AI, “rather than relying on a trained professional whose entire career is about working out what are the right books for different children and making sure that they’re provided.”

He described how every child in this school is entitled under the UN Charter of Human Rights to access information appropriate for their age, as long as it’s not illegal, and that what has happened in Emily’s case sets a worrying precedent.

“You’ve only got to look over at America and to think about who our next prime minister might be to see the risks for our children,” he said.

Emily decided to resign, which also halted the disciplinary action.

“I’ve done that job for over a decade, and it was my dream job, and I was brilliant at it,” Emily said.

The Local Authority meeting about the safeguarding complaint went ahead after Emily’s resignation. The LADO meeting as it is known focused solely on the allegations of “introducing inappropriate material into the school library”.

The meeting was originally scheduled for December 2025, but was cancelled at the last minute, because the Greater Manchester Police had been invited and they didn’t show. It was later agreed the police weren’t actually needed.

When the LADO made their decision in January 2026, they substantiated the allegation, believing that Emily had not caused direct harm but that she had failed to follow safeguarding procedures. Emily had to put in a subject access request to find out why.

In the hearing, the senior vice-principal outlined how the allegation was raised “after discovering multiple books in the school library containing inappropriate content. These books had been loaned to children and did not align with the school’s curriculum”.

There was no mention of the vast quantity of books removed, with only a few titles focused on.

“The fact it’s gone through safeguarding means Emily will never be able to work in a school again,” Roche from the SLG said.

During their investigations, the school referred to their statutory obligations under the government’s Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) and Keeping Children Safe in Education guidance documents and said that materials in the school should align to them.

There is in fact no statutory guidance for school libraries because there is no obligation in law to have either a school library or a school librarian. Following Index’s investigation into school library censorship in 2024, many librarians and supporting bodies have spoken to Index about the confusion this causes, with support for librarians and their books left to the whim of their schools’ senior teams.

“We need the Department for Education to think about how to make the most of school librarians,” Coiffait-Gunn said. “Why is it that prisoners and general citizens are entitled to prison and public libraries, but our children are not entitled to school libraries?”

Mass book removals like this are more common in the USA, where conservative right-wing lobbying groups like Moms for Liberty are well organised and put pressure on schools. There is also coordination with political groups.

Roche said threats of safeguarding accusations being levelled at librarians for stocking books will mean “we will be too scared to support our vulnerable teenagers. Too scared to stock certain books”.

When Emily first started at the school, books like Heartstopper and Black Flamingo were in the library, but there wasn’t much in the way of an LGBTQ+ offering. On an open evening, she put those two books on a table. She says a parent complained to the school that he “didn’t want his son exposed to gender bending”.

“The school defended me and defended those books and their right to be in there, and then two years later, completely forgot about it and changed their mind and said they’re inappropriate,” she said.

Index believes this story is of huge public interest. It is an unprecedented attack on the freedom to read and intellectual freedom, where important safeguarding measures have been misused to threaten and target a school librarian. This librarian is no longer able to do her job. Without this story being surfaced and changes being made, the risk is that it will happen again.

This Greater Manchester school’s library was decimated and the young people who seek answers in books have been terribly let down. Without proper library policies and the reassurance they will be supported, school librarians will no doubt hear about cases like Emily’s and self-censor through fear. Meanwhile young people will not find fulfilling safe spaces in their schools and look for information elsewhere – most likely, on the unregulated internet.

Index approached the school for comment and they have not responded.

Read the follow up to our investigation here

This is the list of books described by the school as the “final List of alleged books with inappropriate content”