We teamed up with think tank Runnymede Trust to launch Lit in Colour, a project that aims to diversify school reading lists by developing and providing a culturally diverse curriculum that more accurately represents today’s students and inspires them to read outside of their classes.

An analysis from Penguin Random House U.K. and Runnymede Trust found that 56 of 65 novels and plays on the GCSE English literature specifications are written by white authors. This report reflects recent data from Teach First, which found that pupils could leave school in England without studying a novel or play by a BIPOC author.

Lit in Colour will offer free books, create teaching resources, and invite authors to visit classrooms.  The program will also analyze what’s currently being taught in English lessons and identify gaps to fill.

Access to a diverse and representative range of books, authors and characters is critical for all students, and we hope Lit in Colour will help inspire a lifelong love of reading by offering a wider range of voices, cultures, and perspectives on school book shelves.

We partnered with Hospital Radio and National Prison Radio to broadcast free audiobooks to patients in NHS hospitals and people in prison across the U.K., offering comfort, escape, and entertainment.

The Hospital Broadcasting Association is a charity supporting a network of more than 200 volunteer-run hospital radio stations that broadcast direct to patients’ bedsides in every NHS hospital in England. During the COVID-19 crisis, there are strict limitations on visiting patients in the hospital—including those not admitted for COVID-19-related reasons—meaning many patients are in even more need of comfort and distraction than ever before. A carefully curated collection of audiobooks was donated, with each station able to choose which titles they want to broadcast.

Made by prisoners, for prisoners, National Prison Radio broadcasts live into the cells of over 100 prisons across England and Wales. The award-winning station is run by the Prison Radio Association charity and offers a unique, innovative, and effective way to communicate with prisoners and engage them in education, debate, and community—aiming to reduce reoffending. The prison population is particularly vulnerable during COVID-19, and as a result, many prisons are on stricter lockdown measures, meaning that many inmates are confined to their cells for large portions of the day and activities are on hold. A collection of carefully curated audiobooks has been donated for broadcast in a new Penguin Life Stories program each week, and will also be made available for Radio Wanno—HMP Wandsworth’s radio station.

At DK, we care deeply about an ethical supply chain and taking positive actions beyond that of a publisher. Our Green Pledge was launched in early 2020 and pulls together all the important work we do to maintain an ethical supply chain, and the positive steps we are planning for the future. Our work is split into four key areas—materials, environment, safety, and sustainable supply chains—and these will continue to be the focus of our efforts. Our Green Pledge acts as an essential framework for our processes, identifying what we have achieved so far in our sustainability goals and what our next steps will be to maintain an ethical supply chain. To learn more about the pledge, click here.

DK is passionate about helping young people to gain the skills they need to shape and achieve their aspirations. Working with a variety of organizations in the UK, including the National Literacy Trust, the Young Academies Group, and Speakers for Schools, DK has held interactive workshops to give school children aged between 5 and 18 years old who come from a variety of backgrounds an insight into a career in publishing and the joy of working with books. These workshops include tours around the DK office in London, talks by colleagues to students about how they got into publishing and what their jobs entail, and setting tasks whereby the children actively participate in the making of a book, giving them a fuller understanding of the publishing process.

Globally, we have increased our efforts to reduce single-use plastic and printing in our offices. Simple solutions have helped us make significant impacts, like using branded Penguin Random House mugs instead of one-time-use paper cups, defaulting to double-sided printing to reduce paper waste, and sharing motivation and encouragement in email signatures to limit printing. In the United Kingdom, we’ve implemented reduction projects to remove single-use plastic from shipping boxes and replaced it with reused cardboard. Transitioning to e-contracts alone has reduced paper consumption in the United Kingdom by more than one million units a year. In Australia, we initiated a “Keep Cup Drive” and saved an estimated 70,800 single-use paper cups from the landfill. In India, we took a pledge to make our office plastic-free and increase our efforts toward reduced energy consumption. India replaced all packaged plastic water bottles with Penguin-branded glass bottles; uses biodegradable paper for waste, has a default setting to print double sided, and automatically deletes print commands after a few hours of no response; and introduced Green Hour every week to avoid using electricity and appliances such as laptops and printers.

Libraries are suffering from a chronic lack of investment – 44% of schools serving the U.K.’s most disadvantaged communities do not have a school library. So far, we’ve worked with 139 primary schools, supporting them to transform their libraries and reading spaces into hubs of creativity and imagination. We’ve reached over 30,000 pupils, and donated more than 50,000 books and trained over 200 teachers. We’re excited to expand Puffin World of Stories to 80 more schools from September 2020. To learn more, click here.

Every year on World Book Day colleagues across the U.K. come together to celebrate the power of reading with children in their local communities. In 2020, we had our largest ever single volunteering effort, as more than 500 colleagues volunteered in literacy-vulnerable areas. We hosted interactive sessions with more 6,000 people in more than 221 schools, nurseries, and community settings including prisons and homeless shelters including storytelling with little ones and a ‘reverse book club’ with adults. To learn more about our volunteer effort, click here.

In March 2019, Penguin Classics launched its #HappyReading pop-up shop in Shoreditch in East London, as part of a campaign to celebrate the joy of reading and the special books that impact our lives. We partnered with the National Literacy Trust to run two workshops as part of the pop-up’s weeklong program of events. The workshops gave students an opportunity to discuss reading for pleasure, meet with working role models from Penguin, and develop valuable skills. Over two days, 50 students participated in the workshops, which we helped facilitate with volunteers from across our various divisions and departments. To learn more about the pop-up, click here and here.

The Spare Room Project aims to address the lack of regional diversity in the industry by providing housing to interns and people working who come from outside London. In 2018 we started sponsoring the project, which matches interns with hosts working in publishing who can offer a spare room or a bed for free for one week. A practical way to help open doors to a more diverse range of people, the Spare Room Project looks for hosts from across the publishing industry, from those in Editorial and Sales to agents and authors. To learn more about the Spare Room Project, click here. To learn more our sponsorship, click here.