Active Lives Children and Young People Survey 2023-24

The survey, carried out by Ipsos on behalf of Sport England received responses from over 140,000 pupils, parents, and teachers from a total of 1,606 schools. The survey was carried out online throughout the autumn, spring, and summer terms 2023-24 in a sample of schools across England. Pupils in school years 1-2 and their parents, pupils in school years 3-11, and one teacher per school completed questionnaires. Active Partnerships, School Games Organisers, and other organizations involved in supporting sports in schools recruited the schools to take part.

In this report comparisons are made with data from the baseline year of the survey (2017-18) and the previous survey year (2022-23). 

The report covers the overall amount of sport and physical activity young people are engaged in, different activities prevalent in different year groups, and the attitudes of children and young people towards sport and physical activity. A new measure of physical activity variety, corresponding with the Chief Medical Officer's guidelines for children and young people to engage in a variety of types and intensities of physical activity across the week to develop movement skills, muscular fitness, and bone strength, is also included in the report.

Other topics include volunteering in support of sports and physical activity and how it is associated with wellbeing, individual and community development. The report introduces the physical literacy consensus statement for England alongside measures of enjoyment, understanding and knowledge of sport and physical activity which contribute towards understanding physical literacy.

This year we have included Sport England’s new inequalities metric in results to explore differences in activity, attitudes and wellbeing by reported characteristics reported by the pupil (gender, ethnicity, family affluence and access to outdoor space). This enables an understanding of the impacts of multiple inequalities.

The report, including data tables and a technical note, has been published on the Sport England website.

• The reports from previous academic years (2017-18 to 2022-23) of the survey (years 1 to 6) are available here: Active Lives Children and Young People Survey.
• To mark International Women’s day 2024 Ipsos released some short videos about how our research, including the Active Lives Children and Young people survey, relates to International Women’s day; in the video we discuss the gap in physical activity levels between boys and girls and how that trend has changed over the course of the last 7 years https://lnkd.in/e5EKY23y 

Technical note

• A sample of schools was drawn from the Department for Education's list of schools (Get information about schools 2022-23), including state primary, state secondary, and independent schools. The survey was carried out across the whole academic year with each selected school allocated to a term. Up to three year groups were selected from each school and one class within each year group were invited to take part.
• The published pupil level data are weighted to match the population as closely as possible. The technical note provides detailed information on sampling, weighting, confidence intervals, and population estimates.
• The questionnaire collected detailed information on participation in various sports and physical activities both in and outside of school over the previous week including information on the type of activity, time spent, intensity, and whether indoors or outdoors. This information was used to create the derived activity variables presented in the report.  The survey also included questions relating to key outcomes in Sport England’s strategy such as wellbeing, individual and community development, volunteering, and sports spectating. Socio-demographic information allowed for analysis of inequalities in sports participation (differences including gender, age, affluence, ethnicity and disability). Questions on swimming proficiency and confidence were also included in the survey. The questions asked across the questionnaire varied based on the pupil's year group. Details of the questions, derived variables and definitions are provided in the technical note.
• Despite the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the survey continued with adaptations that allowed pupils to complete it from home as needed throughout 2020 and 2021. The trend results in this report allow comparison across the last seven years of the survey, including during the pandemic.  The demographic measure of family affluence which includes a question about holidays taken outside England could not be used in a consistent way during the pandemic because of restrictions on travel so for 2020-21 and 2021-22 differences by affluence are not shown in the tables.

Data

• Active Lives Children and Young People Survey data from survey years 1 to 6 (2017-18 to 2022-23) are available from the UK Data Service.