The education secretary has criticised the removal of selected poems by Philip Larkin and Wilfred Owen from a GCSE course as “cultural vandalism”. William Blake, Emily Bronte, John Keats, Sylvia Plath and Carol Ann Duffy are among those established poets remaining in the OCR GCSE anthology. Removing their work from the curriculum is cultural vandalism," he wrote. Launching the new set of poems, OCR said the anthology builds “on the diversity of the original anthology by offering more poems by contemporary and established poets of colour”. The exam board said the poems to be replaced will have largely already been studied and assessed.

Source: The Times June 23, 2022 13:14 UTC