Is Of Mice and Men being dropped from GCSE syllabus?

Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and the Arthur Miller play The Crucible are among the books that have apparently been taken off the GCSE reading list for some students.

The new curriculum is set to be unveiled this week and The Sunday Times reports that three quarters of the books will be by Britons, with the majority written before the 20th century.

Paul Dodd, the head of A-level and GCSE reform at exam board OCR, said: “[Steinbeck’s] Of Mice and Men, which Michael Gove really dislikes, will not be included. It was studied by 90 per cent of teenagers taking English literature GCSE in the past.”

However, he also pointed out that between 70-80 per cent of the work studied on the current curriculum are by British authors.

Twitter users started the hashtag #getgovereading in an outraged bid to highlight classic literature by non-British writers – although the Department of Education was trying to pour cold water on the row, tweeting: “We have not banned US literature from English Literature. Here is the guidance on the minimum content GCSEs must include ow.ly/xeB0G.”

Perhaps predictably, the nuances in the story did not stop tweeters from getting quite heated quite quickly, with the hashtag soon trending across the UK. Some of the recommendations are below.

What would #gove say if American students couldn’t study #Shakespeare ?

— HelenLaRouge (@Harryb22) May 25, 2014

@maryhippychick yes. Been suggested we send books to Gove. But maybe local schools instead? #getGovereading

— Stella Duffy (@stellduffy) May 25, 2014

#getgovereading As a young person I loved Mark Twain & Louisa May Alcott. Always loved Old Man and Sea – Hemingway. #getgovereading

— Emma Hinton Chesters (@emmachesters1) May 25, 2014

#GetGoveReading Sylvia Plath, Toon Tellegen, Wallace Stevens, Yeats, Kerouac, Akhmatova, Simic, Walcott, Neruda, Borges, Hart Crane, Lowell

— Sarah Wallis (@wordweave) May 25, 2014

#GetGovereading – Montaigne’s essays. Ageless miracles of wit, style and humane insight. Not bad for a Frog, Mike.

— Craig Ranapia (@CMRanapia) May 25, 2014

.@stellduffy Ruth Ozeki, Karen Joy Fowler, Jonathan Swift, Aristotle, Baudelaire, Umberto Eco, Salam Rushdie, Borges #getGovereading

— Cheryl Morgan (@CherylMorgan) May 25, 2014

The chair of the National Association for the Teaching of English, Bethan Marshall, told the Sunday Times: “It’s a syllabus out of the 1940s and rumour has it Michael Gove, who read literature, designed it himself. Schools will be incredibly depressed when they see it.”

She argued that studying 19th century British works would deter students from continuing with the subject, saying: “Kids will be put off doing A-level literature by this. Many teenagers will think that being made to read Dickens aged 16 is just tedious.

“This will just grind children down.”