More Children's books in the U.K. are now featuring racially minoritized characters. This was revealed in the survey conducted by the Center for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE).
Pupils at Williamwood High School attend a math class on February 5, 2010 in Glasgow, Scotland. As the UK gears up for one of the most hotly contested general elections in recent history it is expected that that the economy, immigration, the NHS and education are likely to form the basis of many of the debates.
This is a good thing since more and more children can now see other characters aside from White people; giving them a chance to learn more about other ethnicities.
The survey analyzed children's books with racially minoritized characters from 2017 until 2022.
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When CPLE first conducted its survey in 2017, there was only a 4% increase.
However, in its 6th survey, this number reached 30% (2022). This shows that there's a rising trend in children's books featuring other ethnicities that are not White; 7% in 2018, 10% in 2019, 15% in 2020, and 20% in 2021.
CLPE Research & Development Executive Director Farrah Serroukh shared her excitement about the rising children's books with racially minoritized characters.
"We welcome the increase in overall output and were pleased to encounter more variation in the breadth of realities reflected in the literature we reviewed," she said.
However, the children's books they analyzed, such as "JoJo & Gran Gran Go," "Hairdresser" by Laura Henry-Allain, "Through the Forest" by Yijing Li, and "My Mum is a Lioness," have some parts that don't properly depict racially minoritized characters.
Because of this, CPLE said that this makes it "challenging to decipher presence and in other instances, the role allocation felt tokenistic or formulaic."
Farrah is currently encouraging publishers to improve the quality and volume of their children's books in order to properly reflect the realities that other ethnicities face.
"We encourage publishers and creatives to build on the traction of recent years and continue to strive towards improving the volume and quality of titles that meaningfully reflect realities available to young readers," she explained.
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Most Featured Racially Minoritized People
Noa, a six-year-old pupil, reads her book during her first day of school after the summer break at St Luke's Church of England Primary School in East London on September 3, 2020. - Pupils in Britain have on Thursday begun to return to schools for the first time since they were all closed in March, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
CLPE said that the children's books they analyzed mostly featured Black characters (6.8%). The second most featured racially minoritized characters are those with mixed heritage backgrounds.
They made up 4.6% of the children's titles. Meanwhile, over 1% of these books featured characters from South Asian backgrounds. These non-White ethnicities are mostly included in fiction titles.
From 2017 to 2022, racially minoritized characters are increasing in these fiction children's books. However, this is not the case for non-fiction and picture books since both of these genres saw drops in 2022.
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