A UK school library has been purged of books, including the 1984 graphic novel, apparently at the headteacher’s instruction.

In concerning signals bearing the hallmarks of book purges in the US, a school library in Greater Manchester was reportedly stripped of nearly 200 books it deemed “inappropriate”.

An Index on Censorship report found that the school used AI to classify which books to remove, and later said they “consider this classification to be broadly accurate”.

The school in question was not publicly identified in the report, but it’s understood to go up to Year 11 and even had a designated book section for those about to leave school.

Among the list of books deemed “inappropriate” are titles by Dan Brown and JK Rowling, Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight and even Cheryl Cole’s biography.

The purge reportedly began in November 2025 when the school librarian included the book Men Who Hate Women on a slide deck of recommended reading, a non-fiction book on extreme misogyny and “how it affects us all.”

However, the headteacher demanded that the book be removed from the shelves instead because of the exposure of misogynistic beliefs, and it was later put in the staff library.

According to the librarian, who wished to remain anonymous, an investigation was launched and when she returned to the library she noticed books were missing.

“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,” the librarian said of titles that had been removed.

The librarian was then told to remove books that weren’t for children, that had upsetting themes, and could be inappropriate or constitute a safeguarding risk

“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,” the librarian said.

The librarian was then reported as a “safeguarding risk” over books being in the library in the first place which were deemed inappropriate.

“I was absolutely gobsmacked,” the librarian told the Index investigation. “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.”

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