Official Statistics

Guidance: Interpreting our statistics

Published 31 July 2026

Applies to England

The Community and Engagement Survey (CES) is a nationally representative annual survey of people aged 16 and over in England. The survey is designed to explore how people engage with their community, culture, media and live sport, allowing respondents’ views to be heard on a range of issues affecting their local area. This release provides estimates collected during 2025/26^{[footnote 1]}.

In 2025/26, DCMS partnered with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) to boost the Community pathway (previously Community Life Survey; CLS) of the CES. This enabled the production of meaningful estimates at the Local Authority (LA) level. The CES questionnaire was developed collaboratively to reflect the priorities and interests of both departments. As a result, in 2025/26, the survey included new questions as well as changes to existing ones, including updates to response options and definitions. Survey changes are documented in the accompanying technical report. Questionnaire changes can affect results, and therefore should be taken into consideration when interpreting the findings. 

This release presents the headline estimates during the period from April 2024 to March 2026, alongside key demographic and geographical breakdowns and a time series where previous data is available. Comparisons of this year’s 2025/26 results are made against the previous year 2024/25 (covering the period of April 2024 to March 2026) in the accompanying data tables. When making comparisons between data, it should be noted that:

• CES estimates remain comparable to the previously recorded data from both the Participation Survey (PS) and CLS unless otherwise noted. 
• Confidence intervals were narrower in survey years with boosted sample sizes for the relevant survey pathways compared with other years. For example due to the increased sample size for the CES Engagement pathway, confidence intervals in 2025/26 were narrower than those recorded in 2024/25 for engagement questions. Similarly, for the Community pathway (previously the CLS), confidence intervals were narrower in 2025/26 compared to 2021/22, when the sample size was approximately 10,000 respondents.

In this publication, only statistically significant differences between groups are reported on. That is, where we can be more confident that the differences seen in our sampled respondents reflect real differences in the population^{[footnote 2]}.

The majority of estimates in this report are rounded to the nearest whole number. Where there has been a small but significant statistical change, estimates may be presented to one decimal place for clarity. As data are rounded, some changes may appear bigger or smaller than they are. The unrounded numbers are available in the corresponding data tables.

Some survey questions are multi-coded meaning that respondents could select any number of response options. In these cases, the sum of the percentage for responses will exceed 100%.

The CES issues both paper and web questionnaires. In order to reduce respondent burden and due to routing complexities on a paper questionnaire, not all questions are included in the paper questionnaire. The web questionnaire is also split into core and subset questions. Subset questions are only asked of approximately a third of online community pathway respondents and approximately a half of online engagement pathway respondents, and core questions are asked to all online respondents.

We have noted cases where questions were only asked to online respondents, so these data will only reflect the online population. We have also noted where questions were only asked to a subset of online respondents. Due to changes in the questionnaire, there may be differences in the population responding between survey years.

We will be publishing in-depth sector reports on the 14th of August. Where possible, demographic breakdowns are provided for age, disability status, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, socio-economic classification, and IMD and geographic breakdowns are provided by ITL1 area, ITL2 area, and Combined Authority or Local Authority areas. 

However, where there are more than 6 options, we have compared the group to the national average, providing context on how the particular value for that demographic compares to the whole population. This applies to the age, religion and ethnicity demographic groups. The exception to this rule is for the Index of Multiple Deprivation demographic where a standard approach is to compare the least and most deprived areas. The caveat with this approach is that comparing with the national average includes comparing the specific demographic group against itself. This is particularly an issue when the demographic makes up a large proportion of all respondents.

1. Questions within the Engagement pathway were asked to respondents from April 2025 to March 2026 through the Participation Survey (April to September 2025) and the Community and Engagement Survey (October 2025 - March 2026). Whilst the sample size for the follow up questions are representative across the full time period, the sample size for the headline physical and digital art/heritage/museum/library estimates are considerably larger for the latter 6 months through the Community and Engagement Survey and therefore these headline estimates are biased towards responses collected from October 2025 to March 2026. Questions within the Community pathway of the Community and Engagement Survey were asked to respondents from October 2025 to March 2026 only. ↩

2. The 95% confidence intervals are indicated by error bars on the charts. They show the range that we are 95% confident that the true value for the population falls between. When there is no overlap between the error bars for two or more groups, we can be more confident that the differences between the groups represent true differences between these groups in the population. ↩