An exam board has apologised after a GCSE English exam used a passage from a book in which a character was raped.

Pupils complained that the unseen text in their exam paper was taken from a story that later goes on to detail how a young woman becomes pregnant after being sexually exploited by her employer.

The passage featured in Tuesday’s exam - which was about a couple and their daughter Alice who sell produce to people in their local area from a van - is an extract from The Mill, a short story by H. E. Bates, published in 1935.

Students were asked to analyse the language used in the text as well as its structure, and what feelings are evoked by its descriptions of Alice and her parents.

Later on in the story, Alice's parents send her to work at a mill where the she endures the unwelcome attention of her employer who rapes her, then dismisses her after she falls pregnant.

The description of the rape was not part of the excerpt in the exam paper, but students nonetheless protested that the excerpt should have come with a “trigger warning”.

“Some people I know were actually disturbed and worried by the extract,” Alana Kingsley, a pupil from Lowestoft, Suffolk wrote on Twitter.