Glossary of terms

The Chief Medical Officer’s (CMOs) guidelines for all adults recommends that people are physically active for 150 minutes at a moderate intensity per week. Each minute of vigorous activity counts as two moderate minutes. Sport England refer to adults who meet these guidelines as being active. 

The CMOs guidelines recommend that children and young people are physically active for 60 minutes or more a day at, at least, a moderate intensity. Sport England refer to those that meet these guidelines as being active.

In 2022 the CMOs issued new guidelines, recommending disabled children and young people get 20 minutes of exercise a day and do strength and balance activities three times a week.

Sport England invests in 42 local organisations across England known as Active Partnerships. They use a place-based approach to reduce inequalities by working with local and national stakeholders to transform lives through movement, physical activity and sport. You can find out more on the Active Partnerships website.

A problem or situation that requires people to change their beliefs, values, behaviours, or ways of working in order to find a solution. Unlike technical problems, which can often be solved by applying existing knowledge or expertise, adaptive challenges do not have straightforward solutions and cannot be fixed by authority or experts alone.

Mapping out the physical assets, or places and spaces, that people can go to or use to take part in sport or physical activity. These can be formal or informal, dedicated or multi-purpose spaces. Mapping out what assets exists and what’s happening in a community is a helpful way of visualising what’s already there, what’s missing and where improvements can be made in your local area. 

A design approach that actively involves users and stakeholders in creating solutions to solve common problems. Co-design should start at the beginning of a project/programme or intervention and continue all the way through to its delivery. Input and feedback is requested from interested parties and participation is based on individuals using their professional and/or lived knowledge and experiences to shape thinking and action. Also see Co-production.

Working together, with other stakeholders and partners, to solve a commonly shared objective or problem. 

A values-based way of working where providers and users work together as equals to influence how services, projects or activities are designed, commissioned and delivered. It’s built on the principle that those who are directly affected by something are best placed to help design or produce it. Also see Co-design.

People experiencing barriers to being able to access and use digital devices like computers, smart phones and the internet. 

Ways of, and mechanisms for, collecting feedback from relevant parties that allows for improvements or adjustments to be made to actions and solutions to ensure their relevance and effectiveness.

The World Health Organisation define green spaces as ‘all urban land covered by vegetation of any kind’. Green spaces can include, but are not limited to, parks and gardens, natural and semi-natural spaces like woodland and wildlife conservation areas, green corridors, outdoor sports facilities, amenity spaces, play areas, skate parks, ball courts, allotments, community gardens and farms, cemeteries and burial grounds. Blue spaces refer to aquatic-based environments for example lakes, rivers, the sea, reservoirs, canals and swimming pools.

A top-down, pyramid shaped, leadership structure and approach that follows a clear chain of command. Responsibilities and decision-making decrease the further down the pyramid you are - from the top downwards.

The state of being unequal, or an imbalance or lack of fairness between different groups, individuals or outcomes. Inequalities are present in lots of social, health, educational and other community settings. These are largely mirrored in people’s activity levels.

Sport England define innovation as applying a creative mindset, generating ideas and experimenting to make positive changes that improve people's experiences of physical activity. It’s an approach that puts people’s needs at the heart, continually learning and adapting to remove the real-life barriers they are facing.

A concept derived by Kimberlé Crenshaw where the identities of people with more than one inequality factor or protected characteristic interconnect and interact to create a cumulative effect. These people are more likely to experience inequality and are likely to be less active.

A series of pilot projects by Sport England in 12 local communities across England. Designed to test innovative approaches to tackling inactivity, the pilots focused on understanding the conditions, principles and structures needed to address inequalities, remove barriers to participation and fostering collaboration between local organisations. 

A Sport England platform that provides data-driven insights to local authorities, delivery partners, and stakeholders. It pulls together and integrates disparate data sets into dashboards and maps, enabling informed decision-making to promote community physical activity and support place-based working. 

A consortium working with stakeholders (including Sport England) that supports the collection and use of data for the purpose of learning to support people to take better action tackling inequalities to help achieve a population level change in physical activity over time. Their website shares insights into the methods, tools and resources used for evaluating complexity. 

Being person-centred is about focusing on the unique needs of an individual and taking account of their opinions, preferences, barriers and values to provide activities or solutions that respect and respond to them.  

Bringing together local people and organisations in a bottom-up approach to meet the unique needs and circumstances of a place. Place-based working puts communities at the heart of everything.

Place Partnerships are a Sport England funded initiative that focus on creating lasting change within the communities that need the greatest levels of support and experience the greatest levels of inequality. Grown from the learning from the LDPs, Place Partnerships encourage local organisations and stakeholders, in selected places across the country, to work together to ensure that more people can live active and healthier lives for longer. The Place Partnership page on the Sport England website provides more information.

Concept developed by Sir Michael Marmot that describes actions or interventions that are delivered with a scale and intensity proportional to the level of disadvantage, whilst ensuring universal access, meaning they’re available to everyone. At Sport England this principle has been applied to tackling inactivity and the inequalities that underpin it and forms the basis of the Place Universal Offer.

Different ways of classifying individuals and groups based on a combination of social and economic factors including, but not limited to, their employment status and occupation, education and income levels.

A framework that views health and well-being as influenced by interactions between individuals and their social and physical environments. It emphasises that behaviour is shaped by multiple levels of influence, including individual factors, social relationships, community settings, and broader societal conditions.

Creating a map of all the individuals, organisations and local leaders that make things happen in your local community. Stakeholder mapping helps to develop a picture of your local network and its strength. It’s often used alongside asset mapping and social network analysis when drawing together insight.

An approach to systems change, which is based on understanding how each part of the system affects people’s behaviours and habits. It’s founded on the belief that a change in one part of the system can influence what happens elsewhere. Also see Place-based approach.

A leadership approach that develops a culture and the conditions for whole systems change to thrive. System leaders are focussed on pursuing a common purpose that’s shared by partners across all parts of the system. 

A method of making sense of complexity by focusing on understanding a system’s interconnected elements and influences in a larger context. Encouraging taking a bigger perspective, this type of thinking considers relationship patterns and challenges assumptions and existing ways of thinking, to understand situations and drive sustainable solutions.

Groups of people who have limited or no access to, or are included less often, in opportunities or services than one would expect based on their population prevalence. 

Sport England’s Uniting the Movement strategy looks to transform lives and communities by tackling inequalities, by providing opportunities to people and communities that have traditionally been left behind and helping to remove the barriers to sport and physical activity.