Research and Insight services

We:

• Derive meaningful insight for you
• Translate this insight into practical recommendations to help you
• Share and disseminate the work via our networks to shape policy and practice.

Primary Data Sets

Working with us brings access to the following:

• Youth voices — a rich and growing data set, from talking to 26,000 young people about their barriers, motivations and perceptions of PE, physical activity and sport
• School Workforce and Learning Academy data — data from hundreds of school sports practitioners on the delivery of PE across schools
• National School Games data — the most robust data set on school sport competition and participation levels across England.

Examples of our work: 

To assist the Football Association (FA) with their ‘Gameplan for Growth’ strategy (to double the number of women and girls taking part in football by 2020), we developed an interactive tool that brought together football participation data from across multiple programmes, databases and organisations. This tool produced maps which allowed each one of the 50 County FAs to identify their area’s participation “hot spots” for women and girls football thereby underpinning their implementation of the new strategy.

The FA’s Women and Girls Football National Mapping Tool

In 2016, working with Women in Sport, we surveyed over 26,000 students from 138 secondary schools which had signed up to the Girls Active programme. This large quantitative study into girls’ and boys’ experience of physical activity and PE in secondary schools produced very valuable insight into their attitudes, motivations, barriers and behaviours relating to being physically active.

Our findings showed a clear gender participation gap — girls were, on average, less physically active than boys, they experienced more barriers to taking part in PE and sport than boys, such as lower confidence and poor body image. They are missing out on opportunities to lead healthy lives and develop key life skills associated with sport and physical activity, such as teamwork, leadership and communication.

Girls Active Research