Exam board slammed for putting Russell Brand on reading list for English A-level

The OCR exam board has been criticized for introducing Russell Brand's testimony on drug as part of their new A-level English course, it has been revealed.

According to the Guardian, the A-level which also includes Times journalist Caitlin Moran's Twitter feed, Samuel Pepys's diary entries, interview of rapper Dizzee Rascal and work of former Guardian columnist, the Secret Footballer, has been denounced as 'rubbish' by the Department for Education.

A senior source of DfE warned the schools saying that pupils may not get through good universities and they expect better from other exam boards.

But despite all the condemnation, the exam board sustained the course and met the latest Ofqual and DfE guidelines, claiming that study matter was most diverse in any English A-level, and has the diversity of poems by Emily Dickinson and William Blake, greatest memoirs such as Solomon Northrop's Twelve Years a Slave and Jhumpa Lahiri's contemporary fiction.

The board had teamed up with an educational charity, the English and Media Centre, to develop the literature to study unorthodox texts.