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Our commitment to fairness and equality
Books open doors to new worlds, allow children to walk in someone else’s footsteps, help them learn new skills, and encourage them to explore new ideas. For this to be effective, all children – including children of every ethnicity, age and gender – must be able to see themselves in our books, as well as seeing people who are different from them, in many ways.
Effective diversity and inclusion of all kinds is crucial. However, we particularly recognise the urgency to do all we can to counter racism against Black people and to promote equal representation of Black people in our company, our community and our books.
We know there is a lot we need to do to achieve this, and to properly address inclusion and diversity throughout our publishing and our organisation. We commit to do this.
In this section you can read more about:
The Black Lives Matter protests are, in my opinion, the most significant of my (now long) lifetime, and have been an appropriate wake up call for our industry, including very much us at Usborne. They have strongly reiterated the injustices and inequalities faced by Black people all over the world and that we all have a responsibility to commit to change.
Applied is recruitment software to de-bias the recruitment process. Despite our best intentions, humans are less-than-perfect at making decisions. Studies show that the tools we have traditionally used to aid our decision-making — like CVs, unstructured interviews, and network connections — only exacerbate these embedded biases. We are aware that the publishing industry is not diverse enough, and that Black and Ethnic Minority candidates are currently particularly under-represented. As traditional recruitment methods encourage people to hire people who are ‘like them’, we have decided to use Applied for all vacancies across our business. By anonymizing applications and building transparency and analytics into every step of the process, Applied will hopefully help us to discover talent that might have otherwise been missed, and help us to build a more diverse staff, representative of our wider society.
As well as processing all job applications through Applied, we are also advertising those vacancies to a wider and more diverse pool of candidates. We regularly share vacancies via networks including Black Young Professionals, Creative Access and Run The Check and support Positive Action in our recruitment practices to remove the lack of representation in the organisation of Black, Asian and Ethnic Minority groups.
We are constantly assessing the impact of these actions and taking further steps all the time.
We are an employer partner with Creative Access to bring in and develop talent from under-represented communities in these ways:
Access Aspiration is funded by the Mayor’s Fund For London, to create more visibility of careers and pathways into employment for 16-18 year olds, through aspirational employer encounters and experiences.
Young Londoners from low income backgrounds, particularly those from Black, Asian, or Minority Ethnic communities, face an extremely competitive labour market when they leave education. This is compounded when other barriers come into play. Only 17% of London’s professional jobs are occupied by people from lower income backgrounds compared to 30% nationally. The problem is not only one of access, but also of representation. Research has shown that more than a quarter of young people from low income backgrounds believe that ‘people like me’ do not succeed in life.
Access Aspiration is designed to tackle these issues by providing careers support and guidance for young Londoners who are making key decisions about their future, but struggling to make links with employers.
We know that people from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic communities are underrepresented in the publishing industry, as are people from low income backgrounds. We must change that. Our partnership with Access Aspiration helps us to reach young people from these groups at a key moment in their lives, where they are making decisions about further education and pathways into employment.
Usborne staff across all of our departments are volunteering their time to deliver in-person events in schools and digital content for students to access online. We hope to demonstrate that children’s publishing is a viable career choice for people from all backgrounds, and to encourage a more diverse new generation to join the publishing industry.
Alongside our partnership with Access Aspiration, Usborne staff are encouraged to visit schools and colleges in their communities to talk to children of all ages about our industry and what we do, from how a book is made for primary kids to careers in publishing for older students. We offer paid volunteering days to facilitate this, and the sessions for Access Aspiration.
In 2018 we set up The Usborne Academy Week as an opportunity for eight people from groups currently under-represented in publishing, particularly those from Black, Asian and other Ethnic Minority backgrounds, to spend an all-expenses-paid week at Usborne. Having run this for two successful years, we have taken on board feedback from partners, consultants and our wider communities, and decided to reassess what we are offering. Going forward we will be running The Usborne Academy through Access Aspiration, targeting 16-18 year old Londoners through their network of state secondary schools.
Over half of the 30+ state schools which Access Aspiration works with have Pupil Premium rates of 50–65%, and over two thirds of the students it supports are from Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic backgrounds. We hope that, by working closely with Access Aspiration and its network of London secondaries, we will be able to showcase what we believe is an exciting, creative and collaborative industry, and that some of these extremely talented young people might be inspired to pursue publishing as a career in the future.
We commit to ensure that every child can relate to the characters in our books, as well as learning about people who are different from them. There is still a gap to close between where we are now, and where we need to be.
We are committed to increasing the number of books we publish that both feature a diverse range of characters and are about diversity. We are also committed to improving the quality and authenticity of that inclusion. We are particularly aware that we do not have enough Black representation in our books. We are examining both our backlist and our new titles to address this.
We are also working on books for our future publishing programme which tackle racism and inequality in a way that will help parents to talk about these issues with their children.
Usborne has built a partnership with the children’s educational charity Show Racism the Red Card. Their courses and conferences educate 50,000 young people and 6,000 adults every year, working towards making Britain a safer, more tolerant place to live.
We are currently collaborating with Show Racism the Red Card on two anti-racism titles, which will be published soon:
• Lift-the-flap First Questions & Answers: What is racism? written by Katie Daynes and Jordan Akpojaro, illustrated by Sandhya Prabhat (September 2021)
• Lift-the-flap Questions and Answers about Racism, written by Jordan Akpojaro, illustrated by Ashley Evans (January 2022)
We shall be supporting Show Racism the Red Card through charitable donations, as well as payment for their consulting. We are also donating copies of the books published ‘in association with Show Racism the Red Card’ for them to distribute in schools. They are providing feedback on a range of new titles that we’re working on (not just those focusing on anti-racism, but across a broad range of topics), and providing staff training for all Usborne employees.
Pathways Into Children’s Publishing is an illustration programme for artists from diverse backgrounds. This two-year programme is for talented and ambitious artists who want to be the next generation of children’s book illustrators. Launched in 2019, it’s run by not-for-profit children’s literature agency Pop Up Projects and House of Illustration, and funded by Arts Council England’s National Lottery Projects Grants and universities and publishers, including Usborne.
Illustrators who take part in Pathways will receive masterclasses and tutorials from illustrators and university tutors, as well as art directors from publishing houses. They will be mentored throughout the programme and will create and publish a body of work, the best of which will be sold at House of Illustration and Round Table Books.
Megaphone is a writing programme which aims to amplify the voices of writers of colour in British children’s literature. This writer development and mentoring scheme gives support to Black, Asian and other Minority Ethnic writers as they write their first novel for children or teenagers.
Set up by author Leila Rasheed, Megaphone received funding from Arts Council England and the Publishers’ Association in its first year. In 2020-2021, Megaphone will be supported by Usborne, with their donation paying for the fees of all candidates on the one-year programme.
Stephanie King, Commissioning Fiction Editor at Usborne Publishing and volunteer at Megaphone says: “I am so excited to be part of the Megaphone project, consciously and proactively seeking out stories which speak authentically to young readers growing up in our diverse society. Books initiate change by firing the imagination and starting important conversations, so it’s about time we started working to nurture talented voices whose stories may previously have been overlooked or marginalised.”
The Everybody In charter was launched by Inclusive Minds in 2015 and we were one of the first publishers to sign up to it. The key aim of the Everybody In charter is to help everyone involved in the book world make books more inclusive. The charter was developed in close liaison with publishers, booksellers, librarians, authors, illustrators, teachers, and trade organisations.Everyone who signs up to the Everybody In charter must make a pledge – a public commitment to what they are going to do. You can read Usborne’s pledge on the Everybody In website.
A note about partner relationships: We are proud to work with all the organisations listed on this page, who are helping us to move forward in the essential area of inclusion and diversity. We are thankful for their input, but want to be clear that working with them does not constitute their endorsement of our products.