Community and Engagement Survey

The Community and Engagement Survey

The Community and Engagement Survey (CES) is a continuous push to web survey of adults aged 16 and over in England, with paper surveys available for those not digitally engaged or wishing to complete online. Verian is carrying out the survey on behalf of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). 

The CES has been 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. The findings will help Government, charities and other public sector organisations understand how people engage with culture, media and a range of activities, as well as understand more about communities across England. It will help inform and shape policy and decision making. 

The CES replaces DCMS’ Participation Survey and Community Life Survey and runs as a joint survey in practice. This was in response to a public consultation about DCMS’ social surveys run in 2024. The content for the CES has been kept broadly similar to the previous surveys but combining the surveys will result in efficiencies and more coherent outputs. This approach provides an opportunity to ask a small number of survey questions to the full sample across both question sets - for example in 2025/26 the Community Life Survey questions will be asked of a sample of 175,000 whilst the Participation Survey questions will be asked of a sample of 33,000. A combined module of questions, comprising questions from both survey sets, will be asked of the full sample of 208,000.  This means that Local Authority (LA) level data will be available for a small number of Participation Survey questions  (and, in future, vice versa in any future year where we collect LA-level data for the Participation Survey but not the Community Life Survey).

Fieldwork for the CES will start in October 2025. Fieldwork for the Community Life Survey questions in 2025/26 will be delivered over two quarters (October to December 2025 and January to March 2026) due to additional survey setup requirements. The fieldwork for the Participation Survey questions in 2025/26 began in April 2025 as part of the Participation Survey fieldwork until September 2025. The Participation Survey questions will continue to be asked as part of the CES from October 2025 until March 2026. As such there are two quarterly CES publications in 2025/26, in addition to an annual publication, which covers the period of October 2025 to March 2026 (for Community Life Survey questions) and April 2025 and March 2026 (for Participation Survey questions).

In 2025/26, DCMS will partner with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) to boost the sample size to be able to produce meaningful estimates at the Local Authority (LA) level for the majority of the data for the Community Life Survey questions. 

The questionnaire for 2025/26 has been developed collaboratively to adapt to the needs and interests of both DCMS and MHCLG.

The majority of the data from the Participation Survey questions will be available at ITL2 area (Counties, Combined Authorities and groups of counties) level. As a result of combining the two surveys, some headline estimates will be available at Local Authority level. 

What the survey covers

The survey covers a range of topics. The survey will focus on either engagement in cultural, sporting or major events or on engagement with your community, and participants are assigned to one of these topics when they first enter the survey. This means that different people in the same household may be asked different questions.

Participants may see questions on some of the following topic areas:

• Demographic information
• Social networks
• Strength of relationship with community and local area
• Engagement in civic activities and volunteering
• Availability and opinion of local facilities and amenities
• Arts attendance and participation
• Libraries & archives use
• Heritage engagement
• Museums, galleries & cultural property engagement
• Live sporting attendance
• Gambling (e.g. bets on horse racing and other sporting events)
• Domestic tourism
• Major events (sporting and cultural)
• Broadband and internet use

What we publish

Survey data will be available in three forms:

• Quarterly releases will give a high level summary of the key measures
• Annual releases will give a more detailed summary of the data.
• Annual datasets will be archived on the UK Data Archive.

Statistical releases

Statistical releases for the Community and Engagement Survey can be found on the Community and Engagement Survey: statistical releases page. 

If you are interested in previous releases from the Participation Survey or the Community Life Survey, they can be found at:

• Annual and Quarterly releases from the Participation Survey
• Annual and Quarterly releases from the Community Life Survey

Statistical releases are Official Statistics publications. Dates of upcoming releases are published in the DCMS Official Statistics Release Calendar

Record-level data

Record-level Community and Engagement Survey datasets will be accessible via the UK Data Service, University of Essex. 

Information for survey participants

Participants in the survey are selected from addresses from the Post Office’s list of addresses in England. This ensures results reflect the experiences and views of the whole population. You can find more information for survey participants on the Community and Engagement Survey: Information for participants page.

Feedback

We are interested in hearing your views on the Community and Engagement Survey. Please contact us with any suggestions or feedback by email at cesurvey@dcms.gov.uk