Report shows fourfold rise in minority ethnic characters in UK children’s books | Children and teenagers | The Guardian

The annual Reflecting Realities Survey from the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE), which monitors the diversity of the UK's children's books, launched in 2018, when it found that just 4% of the children's books published the previous year featured a black or minority ethnic character - and just 1% had a minority ethnic main character. Described as "stark and shocking" at the time, the proportions have increased in each year since, to 7% in 2018 and 10% in 2019, and - with 5,875 children's picture books, fiction and non-fiction titles published in the UK in 2020 - to 15% in 2020, with 8% of titles featuring a minority ethnic main character.

An illustration of a father and son in the mountains, from Pete Oswald's Hike
The report praised Hike by Pete Oswald, the story of a father and child on a day out. Illustration: Pete Oswald/Walker Books

According to the latest official data, 33.9% of children of primary school age in England are from an ethnic minority background.