A new report highlights a lack of diversity in the GCSE English literature curriculum, finding that in 2019 fewer than 1 per cent of candidates answered a question on a novel by a writer of colour.

The research - Lit in Colour: Diversity in Literature in English schools, commissioned by Penguin and the Runnymede Trust, also found that just 7 per cent of candidates studied a book by a woman.

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And just over eight in 10 - 82 per cent - of young people surveyed said they did not recall ever studying a book by a black, Asian or minority ethnic (BAME) writer, while 70 per cent said that diversity is part of British society and should be represented on the school curriculum. 

Analysis of GCSE responses in 2017-19 revealed that just 0.7 per cent of students in England answered a question on a book by a writer of colour. To put this into context, 34.4 per cent of school-age children identify as BAME.

Just 0.1 per cent answered on Anita and Me by Meera Syal, the only novel by a woman of colour on syllabuses in 2019.

Calls for more diverse texts in GCSE English literature

“Availability of diverse texts to choose is not enough for a diverse curriculum at GCSE. The figures suggest that over time schools are converging on An Inspector Calls as their modern text of choice,” the report says.

The research also found that poetry is the most common way for pupils to encounter BAME writers.

“The young people interviewed disliked how many books they study are written by white, middle-aged men; the lack of different perspectives (no LGBTQ+ or non-white perspectives) and the lack of modern books and authors,” the report adds.

The report also finds that teachers lacked training in discussing racism with pupils, with 12 per cent of secondary respondents and 13 per cent of primary respondents saying they had had training on this as part of their ITT course. Just two out of 163 secondary respondents said they had had CPD on the topic.

Velda Elliott, professor of English and literacy education at the University of Oxford, told Tes: “Essentially people lack confidence and they need the chance to talk things through and potentially rehearse how they’re going to talk about race in the classroom but also to be reassured that it’s OK to say, ‘I don’t have all the answers but it’s really important that we talk about this and that we’re open about it.’”

Zaahida Nabagereka, Penguin’s Lit in Colour progamme manager, said: “What the research has come back showing is that time, resources, budget but also a lack of confidence in knowledge about how to talk about race in the classroom are the barriers for teachers and overall this results in a systemic underrepresentation of texts by writers of black, Asian and minority ethnic heritage being represented in the curriculum in relation to both their contemporary British literary excellence but also in relation to the school demographics of the population.

“This is greatly at odds with the fact that there’s 34.4 per cent of those students who do not identify as white British - they are black, Asian and minority ethnic,” she added.

Penguin has worked with Pearson Edexcel and OCR to broaden the range of texts on offer in the English curriculum. The publisher is donating 60,000 books by writers of colour to UK schools in the autumn, including 15,000 copies of Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera.

“The great thing about the Sathnam Sanghera text is that there are aspects of it that history teachers could engage with,” said Ms Nabagereka, adding: “We’re going to be creating a key stage 4 [resource] and a key stage 5 one because we realised the text does have some very complex areas and that it does suit itself to different parts of English and history.”

Other resources include Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo discussing Minty Alley by CLR James as well as a video of Avni Doshi discussing her novel, Burnt Sugar.

Penguin will also be working with Pearson Edexcel to support 93 schools to introduce texts by writers of colour to their GCSE or A-level teaching from September through the Lit in Colour Pioneers programme, impacting 12,000 students, as well as supporting OCR to add new, more representative set texts to its curriculum from 2022.

Halima Begum, director of the Runnymede Trust, said: “The passion for the teaching and learning of English literature in Britain’s classrooms has shone through in this research. Its findings confirm the extent to which teachers and their students are aligned in wishing to see the representation of black, Asian, ethnic minority and, indeed, female authors on the curriculum.

“Nineteenth-century texts have a strong place in the English curriculum, and we are not arguing for their removal. But we hope this consensus around greater representation will encourage the expansion of literary texts available to students to enrich their studies.”

Evaristo, author of Girl, Woman, Other, said: “As publishers slowly open up to a wider range of voices that better reflect the nation, our body of literature is being revitalised and enriched.

“Yet these more inclusive and progressive advances in our society have not yet reached the school curriculum, which continues to sideline writers of colour, in spite of a swathe of eligible material. Literature is a curator of our imaginations, and schools are the caretakers of our young people’s education. They are currently being denied access to the glorious, outstanding and often ground-breaking narratives coming out of Britain’s black and Asian communities.”

Sanghera said: “I was in my final year at university before I read a brown author for academic reasons. I was well into my forties before I began to get my head around the complexity of British imperial history and its modern legacies.

“It has been a thrill to see Empireland seized upon by people, on the left and right of British life, as a balanced way into the often toxic debate about colonialism. And it’s exciting that thousands of young people across Britain will not have to wait as a long as I did to start thinking about these issues - issues which make sense of our multicultural society and define us as a nation.”