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This petition was submitted during the 2019 to 2024 Parliament

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Closed petition Introduce Gender and Race equity for GCSE English Literature set texts

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The UK Government should be doing more to ensure that books written by women and by BAME authors are not only on the English Literature GCSE curriculum, but also become required reading.

The curriculum states that students should study:
- at least one play by Shakespeare
- at least one 19th century novel
- a selection of poetry since 1789
- fiction or drama from the British Isles from 1914

Based on the current reading list, it is too easy for students to only read white male authors.

The following two statements should be added to the curriculum:
- at least one selected text should be written by a female author
- at least one selected text should be written by a BAME author

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