Community and Engagement Survey: October to December 2025
This publication will provide quarterly results on how adults engage with DCMS sectors and their community, covering the period October to December 2025.
Applies to England
Documents
Details
May 2026: Figures for this release have been revised following the identification of minor weighting and data processing errors. The impact is small and further details can be found in the data tables.
The Community pathway data tables in this release have been produced using the methodology of the Community Life Survey (CLS) to allow for robust comparability with the CLS time-series. This methodology differs from the approach used to produce the Engagement pathway data tables and the Participation Survey. We intend to reproduce the Community pathway data tables and the Community Life Survey time series using the Engagement pathway methodology in future to align the entire survey with a consistent methodological approach.
The Community and Engagement Survey (CES) is a continuous push to web survey of adults aged 16 and over in England, designed to explore how people across England engage with their community and with culture, media and live sport and allows respondents’ views to be heard on a range of issues affecting their local area. In October 2025, the Community and Engagement Survey replaced DCMS’ Participation Survey and Community Life Survey.
The CES provides nationally representative estimates of physical and digital engagement with the arts, heritage, museums & galleries, libraries and archives, as well as engagement with tourism, major events, live sports and digital, and tracks the latest trends and developments across areas related to social action and empowering communities.
- Released: 29 April 2026.
- Period covered: October to December 2025.
- Geographic coverage: National level data for England.
- Next release date: July 2026 (quarterly data covering January to March 2026, and annual data for 2025/26)
The Community and Engagement Survey is only asked of adults in England. Currently there is no harmonised survey or set of questions within the devolved administrations of the UK. Data on many areas of the Community and Engagement Survey are available in the Scottish Household Survey, National Survey for Wales and Northern Ireland Continuous Household Survey.
The pre-release access document above contains a list of ministers and officials who have received privileged early access to this release of Community and Engagement Survey data. In line with best practice, the list has been kept to a minimum and those given access for briefing purposes had a maximum of 24 hours. Details on the pre-release access arrangements for this dataset are available in the accompanying material.
Our statistical practice is regulated by the OSR. OSR sets the standards of trustworthiness, quality and value in the Code of Practice for Statistics that all producers of official statistics should adhere to.
You are welcome to contact us directly with any comments about how we meet these standards by emailing evidence@dcms.gov.uk. Alternatively, you can contact OSR by emailing regulation@statistics.gov.uk or via the OSR website.
The responsible statistician for this release is Amie Hayes. For enquiries on this release, contact cesurvey@dcms.gov.uk
Updates to this page
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Notice of revision for change note 28/05/2026: Figures for this release have been revised following the identification of minor weighting and data processing errors. The impact of these corrections is minimal, with the vast majority of changes altering estimates by less than one percentage point. However, some significance levels have changed, and further detail can be found within the ‘Corrections’ tab of the data tables. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.
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Informing users of an error in the weighting used to produce these quarterly estimates, that we plan to revise the tables in May 2026 and in the meantime, for users to use the data tables with some caution.
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First published.