IN DEPTH ‘‘
Dr Carol Webb, Chair of the CILIP School Libraries Group, Librarian.
Alice Leggatt is a secondary school library manager in London and a member of the SLG committee.
Librarians and archivists have long navigated the waters of censorship, book challenges and demands to ban resources in their efforts to uphold intellectual freedom.
Censorship and the librarian
A recent case of book censorship has highlighted some of the pressures librarians are facing to remove items from shelves. Dr Carol Webb and Alice Leggatt look at the issues and discuss what librarians can do.
IN the autumn of 2025, a headteacher objected to the book Men Who Hate Women: from incels to pickup artists, the truth about extreme misogyny and how it affects us all by Laura Bates being present in the school library.
This was swiftly followed by an ‘audit’ where the Designated Safeguarding Lead used an AI tool to generate a list of 130 books it considered unaccept- able for young people to read. Without debate these and others were removed from the shelves and the librarian was formally accused of being a safeguard- ing threat to children. In recent years challenges and censorship in school libraries have been increasing and the denial of children’s access to information has become a more urgent issue.1,2,3
Librarians and archivists have long navigated the waters of censorship, book challenges and demands to ban resources in their efforts to uphold intel- lectual freedom. Our professional history is well punctuated by acts of courage and desperate bravery in the face of attacks on knowledge.4
That struggle
continues today around the world. The documentary The Librarians highlights how US school libraries have faced book purges, often targeting works by black and LGBTQ authors or those addressing rac- ism, sexuality and social change.
It is not unusual for a school librarian to be con- 38 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL
tacted about an individual book by a parent citing a sensitive issue that they feel their child is not yet ready to encounter. What is unusual in this country is a school leadership team misusing the safeguard- ing process to bully a librarian into a huge act of censorship.5
Challenges are becoming more com- plex targeting whole groups of books, largely those representing voices which have emerged over the last decade from historically marginalised groups in our society.
Challenges are no longer being made just by one parent, they can and have come from an anonymous blog, from school colleagues, pupils and organised groups. The aim is to prevent access to those books for all children in that school. What might each of us do when facing the threat of the police being called, the destruction of the library collection, the removal of books which are educationally important for young people and the ruin of one’s professional reputation?
In response to this growing issue CILIP’s School
Libraries Group took part in the inaugural meeting of the Open Pages Forum organised by Alison Hicks, Associate Professor at UCL and Barbara Band, Chartered Librarian, School Library Consultant and SLG Vice Chair. They brought together representa- tives from English PEN, Royal Society of Authors, Libraries Rising, Publishers Association, Independ-
April-May 2026
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60
