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Local Area Insights

Whether you need information to support a grant application, advocate for more facilities or to give you a greater understanding of the people you work with, our Local Area Insights tool can help you provide the evidence base.

Overview

A coach watches on during a football session on a five-a-side pitch

Our Local Area Insights tool let you view and explore key statistics for an area of your choice around numerous themes, such as population, deprivation and health.

Through interactive mapping and online reports, data is presented visually from local community to national level. You can also access and download hundreds of open data sets via a simple search tool, or even define your own area of interest to get custom reports.

Area reports

Here you can select your area if interest and choose one of eight data themes, such as population or deprivation, to access a thematic report for your area. The report shows the characteristics of your area to help you understand it in more depth, as well as providing comparisons to the corresponding region and the national average.

Go to area reports

Map explorer

The map explorer allows you to add layers to a map of the country, splitting England into the geographic unit of your choosing – all the way down to lower super output areas. You can choose a range of statistical measures for your data, which will alter the map visualisation and allow clicking on a specific area to show the data for that location.

Go to map explorer

Data explorer

The data explorer connects to an open data catalogue, allowing you to browse and download the information and create graphics for documents or presentations.

Go to data explorer

Custom area reporter

You can use the custom area reporter to select multiple areas for a bespoke geographic area. The data in the reports for this new area will show aggregated data for all the selected areas.

Go to custom area reporter

Frequently asked questions

  • Who can use our Local Area Insight tools?

    The tools can be used by anyone. They include the geographic areas of interest for our partner organisations, such as local authorities, Active Partnerships and local delivery pilots, but custom areas can also be created.

    The data can be used for a range of applications, including evidence to support funding and investment requests, or gaining a better understanding of the area in which you work and people you work with.

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  • Where does the data come from and how up to date is it?

    The tools provide access to more than 7,000 open data sets, made available by organisations such as the Office for National Statistics, Department for Work and Pensions and Public Health England.

    The data service underpinning the tools is routinely refreshed as organisations publish their open data.

    Therefore, the currency of data will vary for each data set and users should refer to the set's metadata for specific details of the last published data, it's update frequency, source and other information.

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  • Can I export maps, charts and tables, and reuse data from the Local Area Insights tools?

    Yes, and we'd encourage you to share and reuse the data in line with the Open Government Licence.

    Maps, charts and tables from the area reports, map explorer and data explorer can be exported in either an image file, a spreadsheet (.csv) or a PDF. It's also possible to copy and paste data into your own documents.

    The open data sets can be downloaded and reused, subject to the Open Government Licence.

    When reusing maps outputs the following credit statements must be used:

    • Contains National Statistics data © Crown copyright and database right 2020
    • Contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2020
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  • How can I give feedback on these tools?

    We want to know how we can make Local Area Insight work better for you. There's a short form for you to give us with your thoughts on what works well, and what doesn’t.

    Please note, this form will not ask you for any personal details.

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  • I have a question - who do I contact?

    You can get in touch with us by emailing lai@sportengland.org with any queries about our Local Area Insights tools, or any of the data.

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  • When will Sport England data sets be available?

    We'll be working in early 2021 to add our Small Area Estimates of sport and physical activity, as well as Active Lives data.

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  • How should I use Local Area Insights?

    The four Local Area Insights tools are optimised for use on a big screen and on modern web browsers.

    If you're using a mobile device or an older web browser, such as Internet Explorer, you may not be getting the best user experience.

    We would recommend using the tools on a laptop screen or larger, as well as a modern browser such as Chrome, Edge or Safari.

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