The chances are, your child’s bookshelf doesn’t look anything like the UK does.
This could be due to limited representations of ethnicity, family set up, disabilities and gender available in children’s books.
- In the UK, 32% of school age children are of minority ethnic origin
- According to the 2011 census, 1 in 8 people in the UK describe themselves as Arab, Asian, Black, Chinese or Mixed Race
Yet in the CLPE’s (Centre for Literacy in Primary Education) recent report, ‘Reflected Realities’, research showed that only 1% of children’s books published in 2017 featured BAME (Black or minority ethnic), main characters and only 4% of children’s books featured any BAME characters at all.