Sport England and the government recognise the vital role that local programmes and community places and spaces play in helping people to be active.
In order to fully understand this role, Moving Communities provides a real-time view of delivery across programmes, facilities and places, with benchmarking and filtering functionality, alongside mapping tools to understand who is participating and its wider impact on local communities.
Moving Communities is a platform designed to provide active partnerships, local authorities, delivery partners (including national governing bodies, system partners and local organisations) and key stakeholders with intelligence and actionable insights on quantifiable data.
The system brings together disparate data sets into dashboards and maps to help quickly inform and inspire decision-makers to get communities moving. The platform provides dynamic filtering to compare different views of participation across local communities, and the wider social value that creates, for analysis in line with the strategic objectives of that place.
Moving Communities is driven by the largest data set ever gathered for the local public leisure sector and was initially launched in March 2021 to support the National Leisure Recovery Fund, which saw £100m of government funding help the leisure sector recover from the pandemic.
By working collaboratively, Moving Communities: Facilities has enabled local authorities, leisure providers and policymakers to understand the performance of leisure centres and how this compares with national, operational and nearest neighbour benchmarks.
The insight generated from the service has informed strategic decisions about where time, effort and money are best invested to benefit local communities and the audiences most in need of help.
Local use cases include using the data to articulate the impact of new capital investment into local facilities, managing contractual delivery against key performance indicators between a local authority client and a local service provider, and showcasing the value of these facilities against an active wellbeing agenda. Nationally, the data was integral in securing £60m of investment from HM Treasury for the Swimming Pool Support Fund in 2023.
The service has now expanded outside of the original focus on leisure centres to look at physical activity related to delivery programmes and partners across a place. This includes presenting location and activity data from a range of organisations delivering opportunities to be physically active including (but not limited to):
The Moving Communities: Place service sits alongside our Active Places and Active Lives as an important data set to understand our progress in line with Uniting the Movement and our place-based way of working.
If you would like more information on Moving Communities, you can email the team via [email protected].
