The annual Inclusive Books for Children survey of UK publishing for under-10s is not a polemic. It is a count. In 2025, 47 of 2,189 surveyed children's books featured a Black main character — 2.1% of the market serving a demographic that makes up roughly 8.5% of England and Wales's under-10 population. That gap was already embarrassing. It got wider. The south Asian numbers are worse in proportional terms. Representation fell 14.3 percentage points to 1.4%, serving a group that makes up 12.4% of the under-10 population. The MENA figures are almost absurd: three books in the entire surveyed output of a major publishing market, down from six the year before, for a group comprising 2.2% of the population. All three were refugee narratives. Every single one. That last detail is the report's sharpest finding, and author Nadine Kaadan puts it plainly: when the only story a publisher will buy about your region is displacement and war, you have defined an entire culture by its suffering. The 'single story' critique isn't new — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave that TED talk in 2009 — but here it's quantified. Three for three. Not a tendency. A policy, functional if not formal. The disabled representation collapse deserves separate attention. Picture books with disabled main characters: two. Down 60% from the year before. Neither written nor illustrated by a disabled creator. The report's concept of 'incidental representation' — stories where a character simply happens to be disabled, or south Asian, or neurodivergent, rather than stories where that identity is the engine of the plot — names what's missing. Dr Stella Louis's question is the right one: why can't a south Asian child be the hero of an adventure story about friendship, full stop? There were genuine positives. Neurodivergent representation in picture books jumped from 3 to 13 titles. Baby and toddler books with marginalised main characters rose 29.4%. These are real gains, and they suggest the pipeline isn't completely closed — it just closes unevenly and, apparently, is currently closing harder for Black and south Asian characters than it opened. The broader children's reading-engagement context matters here. Jack Hope notes that children's enjoyment of reading is at 'a significant low.' The publishing industry's standard defense against representation critiques is commercial risk: diverse books don't sell. But that argument runs directly into the engagement data. If children aren't reading, and the books don't reflect a third of the population, those two problems are not unrelated. What the report can't tell us — and what matters most — is causation. Is this acquisitions editors making individual calls that aggregate into a pattern? Is it a retreat by major publishers to perceived 'safe' titles in a difficult retail environment? Is it the collapse of specific imprints that were doing this work? The numbers describe a result. The mechanism is still opaque, and until the industry names it, the trajectory of 2026's survey is already foreseeable.
