CLPE Reflecting Realities 2024 | How change happens

“Adult fiction sets out to portray and explain the world as it really is; books for children present it as it should be.” So begins Humphrey Carpenter’s 1985 book Secret Gardens: A Study of the Golden Age of Children’s Literature. Children’s writers and scholars may wish to add nuance to such a bold claim, but they most likely agree with the idea that contemporary children’s books retain a sense of hopefulness and idealism about the world.

In our forthcoming book Beyond the Secret Garden, and in our column for independent children’s book magazine Books for Keeps, we use and extend Carpenter’s metaphor of “the secret garden of children’s literature”: a place of growth and hope—but one that is walled and exclusive, keeping the white British child and their adventures central to the notion of “Britishness”. The Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE), through its Reflecting Realities reports, has exposed this exclusivity with statistics that confirm what many were already claiming. When people from minoritised communities are effectively imagined out of existence in the children’s books that the nation produces, all readers are let down. Children’s literature is typically viewed as both artistic and educational. But, of course, it is also commercial. Teachers can only teach the books that publishers publish. After a period of progress, there has been a significant drop in the number of books featuring a main character from a racially-minoritised background in fiction and non-fiction titles. Are the doors to the secret garden closing once again? 

Relatively recent history suggests that British children’s publishing has a habit of treating racially-minoritised characters as an occasionally marketable trend, often connected with anniversaries or news cycles. Children’s books featuring Black people increased in 2007, the 200th anniversary of Britain’s abolition of the trade in enslaved people. This year’s Reflecting Realities report notes that the numbers of books with Black main characters rose immediately after the Black Lives Matter protests that followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020. However, last year, numbers fell. Reactive publishing makes it difficult for authors of diverse stories—often themselves racially-minoritised people—to build and sustain a career in writing.

The notion persists that books with people of colour on the cover will not be viewed as mainstream

Reflecting Realities reports helpfully focus on the quality, as well as the quantity, of books featuring racially-minoritised people. But even that is not the whole story. Marketing and publicity matter hugely, especially for work that does not neatly fit into the notion of classic children’s literature held by Carpenter and many others. Professor Melanie Ramdarshan Bold has noted that racially-minoritised authors are often left “to promote their own work, through unpaid labour”. This vicious circle leaves authors with less time to write and allows publishers to argue that books with racially-minoritised characters just do not sell, and so are not worth marketing. Though it is rarely stated publicly, we have considerable testimony that racially-minoritised writers often find restrictions imposed upon them. In some quarters, the notion persists that books with people of colour on the cover will not be viewed as mainstream. Indeed, they are still a rarity on the children’s classics table at major bookshops, which is often the first place that adults browsing for books for children visit. And this is one of the ways that children’s books are special. They are almost always bought by people one or two generations older than the children themselves. So yes, it is easier to sell them another book by one of those celebrities who Blacked-up on television, rather than by an unknown author who is consciously trying to avoid telling the kind of story they grew up reading. 

But perhaps the secret garden that has been most resistant to change is that of the publishing houses themselves. It is well documented that the pay for entry-level roles in an extremely London-centric industry makes it very difficult for working-class people in general to consider careers in publishing. And class and race remain entangled. Racially-minoritised writers find their work being edited by people who may well lack the experiential and—considering the curricula of many English degrees—literary knowledge to give them the same level of editorial support as their white peers. And white writers who try sincerely to diversify the characters in their stories may also be without the kind of support they deserve. Those who are often termed “sensitivity readers” (we prefer the term “additional editorial support”) can be helpful, but can also be viewed as band-aids to an institutional problem.

When lacking the requisite knowledge to edit, market and publicise particular books, publishers can become risk averse. More than one writer of colour has told us of being steered away from writing stories featuring young characters of colour and towards writing stories featuring anthropomorphic animals. Animals, it is claimed, are universal. This suggests that we live in a world where white children are more able to relate to a talking penguin than a child with darker skin than them. Or, that book-buying adults erroneously believe this. Or, that publishers themselves erroneously believe this. Sadly, on this matter we still lack the data.

Karen Sands-O’Connor is Visiting Professor of Education at the University of Sheffield, where she is developing a study centre in diverse children’s literature. Dr Darren Chetty is a writer and educational consultant who teaches at University College London.

Read more responses to the CLPE Reflecting Realities report here.