A-level students will study Russell Brand's views on drugs and Caitlin Moran's Twitter feed alongside more conventional literature in a new A-level that was immediately denounced as "rubbish" by sources at the Department for Education.

The OCR exam board said it had teamed up with an educational charity, the English and Media Centre, to develop the A-level in English language and literature to study unorthodox texts, such as a BBC Newsnight interview with rapper Dizzee Rascal and the work of former Guardian columnist the Secret Footballer.

OCR said the exam – a separate course from English or English literature – would include an anthology which included extracts from Brand's testimony on drug use to a parliamentary committee and tweets by Times journalist Caitlin Moran, as well as more conventional fare such as Samuel Pepys's diary entries.

But the education department launched a scathing attack. A senior DfE source said: "Schools should be aware that if they offer this rubbish in place of a proper A-level, then pupils may not get into good universities. We will expect other exam boards to do better.

"It is immensely patronising to young people to claim that they will only engage with English language and literature through celebrities such as Russell Brand."

Gove has said he wants to make A-levels and GCSEs more rigorous and focused on writers such as Shakespeare, while stripping out assessment and relying more on end-of-course examinations.

The DfE's official response hinted that the new A-level would fail to receive approval to be taught in schools from Ofqual, the exam standards regulator, under recent revisions to A-level course content published by the department.

"All new A-levels must be accredited by the independent exams regulator Ofqual against new, more rigorous criteria. This exam has not been accredited and we await Ofqual's decision with interest," a DfE spokesman said.

But despite the DfE's disapproval, OCR maintained that the course met the latest Ofqual and DfE guidelines, saying the range of texts to be studied was the most diverse in any English A-level, ranging from the poems of Emily Dickinson and William Blake to memoirs such as Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave and contemporary works such as fiction by Jhumpa Lahiri.

Hester Glass, the exam board's subject specialist for English language and literature, said: "Historically, English language and literature A-level has lacked a clearly defined identity. By creating a new model with a linguistic approach to literary texts, we aim to set a new gold standard to transform the A-level into a more valuable, distinctive qualification."

Barbara Bleiman, co-director of the English and Media Centre, said Ofqual required the A-level to include spoken and written texts and that modern language use could not be taught through traditional texts alone.

"A Twitter feed is a hybrid that has features of written language and features of spoken language, so it's particularly interesting to study something like Twitter or a blog or online communication because it sharpens the questions of what distinguishes speech and writing," Bleiman said. She disputed the claim that pupils taking the course would suffer when applying to universities.

"This combination of study, of non-literary and literary texts, actually equips students who want to study English at university to do incredibly well because they will have finely tuned linguistic skills," she said.

"I don't think it's going out on a limb in any way. We're not trying to be provocative. We're aiming for something that is exciting, challenging and has some 21st-century texts that are fascinating and really worthy of study," she added.

The texts will include extracts from Russell Brand's 2012 appearance before MPs on the home affairs committee, in which the comedian and author gave evidence on his battle with heroin addiction. When asked by the committee chair, Keith Vaz, if he had been arrested "roughly" 12 times for drug possession, Brand quipped: "Yes, it was rough."

The new English language and literature exam comes as all A-levels in England are being revised, with exam boards creating new course specifications in collaboration with universities.

The DfE recently published a subject content outline that the exam boards are to follow. English language and literature must include at least six substantial texts, featuring at least three important works of prose, poetry or drama.

The new courses have to be approved by Ofqual before they can be offered to schools from 2015, and are also subject to post-examination evaluation. OCR – part of the Cambridge Assessment group – is one of the largest exam boards in England.

Existing English language and literature courses, such as that offered by the AQA exam board, include the poetry of Irish Republican hunger-striker Bobby Sands and interviews with Malcolm X as texts for study.

George Norton, team leader in English at Paston sixth-form college in Norfolk, defended the new course, saying it offered something different to the other English A-levels, was varied and had academic depth.

"It will be hard to resist a course that allows me to teach William Blake, the writing of the Secret Footballer and the script of Dizzee Rascal's Newsnight interview. I'm looking forward to it already," Norton said.

"No one from OCR is proposing that Shakespeare should be subsumed by Simon Cowell transcripts," said Alex Quigley, assistant head and English subject leader at Huntington school in York, who pointed out that the course has always included a wide mix of texts.

"There is no decline in standards to witness here. Just two quite different disciplines being merged in what looks like an interesting and varied course.

"If people are worried about Russell Brand becoming our next poet laureate then you needn't be. Not yet anyway."

• This article was amended on 7 May 2014 to correct the spelling of Solomon Northup's name. An earlier version spelled it as Northrop.