IBC releases Excluded Voices 2025 report

The 2025 report, which surveyed books published in 2024 for readers aged 1 to 9, found that:

• Only 5.9% of books featured marginalised main characters, and just 49% of those were created by authors or illustrators from those groups
• Just 1.3% of book main characters were of South Asian heritage, compared with around 12.5% of pupils in England’s nursery and primary schools
• East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) representation was also lacking, with only 0.8% of books featuring ESEA protagonists, despite approximately 2.6% of young pupils being of ESEA heritage
• Books with Black main characters fell by 21.5% compared with 2023
• Only seven books featured disabled main characters (most were created by non-disabled authors or illustrators), and six featured neurodivergent main characters
• Just 2.8% of books for babies and toddlers featured marginalised main characters
• Fiction for children aged 3 years and up, as well as broader subgenres for toddlers aged 1 to 3, was examined for the report.

Analysis involved identifying books with main characters from marginalised groups by ethnicity, neurodivergence or disability, and whether these books were ‘Own Voice’, i.e. created by authors or illustrators who share the main characters’ marginalised identities.

This timely survey arrives against a backdrop of a wider reading crisis: the National Literacy Trust reports that reading for pleasure is at an all-time low, with only 1 in 3 children aged 8 to 18 saying they enjoyed reading in 2025, a 36% drop since 2005. 

Sarah Satha, co-founder of IBC, said: 

‘Why do these findings matter so much? For one, we face a reading for pleasure crisis, and the narrow range of books hogging shelves is clearly not doing a good job of enticing a wider range of potential booklovers. It’s also not enough to plug the gap with non-Own Voice stories. This type of representation is superficial, and the reader can sense it. More than half of main characters with marginalised identities were created by author-illustrator teams with no lived experience of said identity, and that’s really concerning.’

Marcus Satha, IBC co-founder, added: 

‘Far-right agitators are threatening the peace and security of people from minoritised ethnicities. This underlines how essential it is that creatives with marginalised identities be brought into the fold of children’s publishing. The report highlights the huge missed opportunity to show children, through high-quality, authentic storytelling, that everybody belongs and everybody adds value to society.’

The IBC Excluded Voices 2025 report is available to download here.

Fabia Turner is Head of Content at IBC and the Founder of the Jericho Prize for Children’s Writing. She is also a former primary teacher and educational book editor with a love of children’s literature.