8th annual CLPE Reflecting Realities survey: 24% of children’s books published in 2024 feature a racially minoritised character
The Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE) has released its annual Reflecting Realities Survey of Ethnic Representation within UK Children’s Literature.
The core aim of Reflecting Realities Survey is to determine the extent and quality of representation of racially minoritised characters featured within picture books, fiction and non-fiction for ages 3-11 published in the UK. Launched in 2018, the survey now has almost a decade’s worth of insight and provides an invaluable standard benchmark and guidance for the publishing industry to evaluate output.
This year’s survey reports an overall increase in the percentage of racially minoritised characters featured in published children’s books reviewed from 17% in 2023 to 24% in 2024.
However, last year’s report revealed a dramatic drop, and although this year’s figures represent a positive increase, they are yet to return to the level reported in the 6th report in 2022 of 30%. Welcome as this upward shift is, it is too early to tell whether this increase will stem the impact of the downturn reported in the seventh survey in the long term.
In more welcome news, this year’s report shows the number of racially minoritised main characters has reached the highest reported figure to 
date of 24% in 2024, up from the dramatic low of 7% in 2023 and the highest level in the report’s history.
As CLPE approaches a decade’s worth of data, the 8th Reflecting Realities report calls on the publishing industry to remain steadfast in its commitment to consistently producing high quality inclusive and representative literature as standard practice.
Farrah Serroukh Executive Director of Research and Development, CLPE said, ‘It is a real privilege to have the opportunity to track the output over an extended period as this has enabled us to encourage publishers to remain steadfast in their commitment to ensuring quality inclusive and representative output. We were worried that the dramatic drop reported in last year’s report might mark the start of a downward spiral that would undo the important gains made in prior years, so we have been pleased to be able to report an increase in overall output this eighth survey. Work must now be done to implement mechanisms that ensure that an inclusive lens is applied at every stage from the seed of an idea to the book on the shelf. If this happens, the roots established during this period will be able to take hold, bloom and elevate children’s literature for generations to come.’
Earlier this year, CLPE became a subsidiary charity of the National Literacy Trust, combining the charities’ resources, expertise and networks to scale a shared mission for excellence in literacy education in the UK and internationally. The annual CLPE survey was launched in 2018 and has been funded by Arts Council England since its inception.
The illustrations used in this report are reproduced with the kind permission of Yasmeen Ismail.
