Active Lives Children's Survey Latest Findings

The Active Lives Children and Young People Survey is a National survey that takes a world-leading approach to gathering data on how children engage with sport and physical activity. It gives valuable insight to help understand children’s attitudes and behaviours around sport and physical activity.

For the academic year 2019-2020 we saw the unprecedented closure of schools and felt the restrictions placed on our everyday lives. This has had an impact on children and young people’s activity levels. The table below shows an overview of activity levels across the year.

44.9% of children and young people (3.2 million) met the Chief Medical Officer guidelines of taking part in sport and physical activity for an average of 60 minutes or more a day. This is a decrease of 1.9% (86,500) compared to the same period 12 months ago, although activity levels remain higher than in 2017/18. Less active levels increased by 2.4% from 29% to 31.3%

Key Findings

• Whilst boys activity levels have decreased by 6.4% girls activity levels have increased by 2.4% This means the gender gap for participation has narrowed. Enjoyment levels decreased for boys but stayed the same for girls.
• Activity levels decreased the most for those from the most affluent families, with activity levels remaining the same for those from the least affluent families. It is worth noting that whilst activity levels stayed the same, enjoyment in activity decreased.
• Children and young people from ethnic diverse communities were most likely to be less active and the gap between white young people and those from ethnic diverse communities has widened.
• There was a large decline in sporting activities such as swimming and team sports. There was however, large increases seen in walking, cycling and fitness.
•  Active travel (walking and cycling as a mode of transport) levels increased

David Gent, Active Humber CEO said: 'While the effects of the pandemic on these latest figures are clear to see, this really reinforces the need for our core work around getting the inactive active is more important now than ever before. We will continue to strive to find new ways to make this happen across the Humber working closely with our partners and network in the sector.'

To view the full data packs please visit here