Who Plays, Who Doesn’t, and Why It Matters: The Case for Better Participation Data in Schools and Their Communities
This article is based on ongoing work that is part of Phase 2 of RE.sport, a seven-year SSHRC-funded national research initiative grouping 60+ academic and community partners with the objective of transforming and inspiring community youth sport. Through collaborations, RE.sport exists to reshape the sport system by combining research with practice to break down systemic barriers to make physical activity more inclusive, accessible, and empowering where all youth—especially girls—can explore, grow, and thrive.
Introduction
Sport, physical activity, and recreation play an important role in supporting children’s emotional, social, physical, and academic development, with schools providing an important setting for youth to move and play (Barbosa et al., 2020; Poitras et al., 2016; Wade et al., 2026; Woods et al., 2021). Yet daily physical activity requirements are inconsistently implemented, Physical and Health Education (PHE) time is declining in many jurisdictions, and opportunities to be active remain unevenly distributed across schools and communities (Gollish et al., 2024).
While these trends are concerning, an equally important challenge remains: Canada has limited information about who participates in sport and physical activity, who does not, and the factors that influence participation, especially in schools. As highlighted by the Future of Sport in Canada Commission’s final report, there's currently no coordinated national system for collecting participation data across sport, physical activity, and recreation settings (Maisonneuve et al., 2026).
Understanding participation patterns is essential for educators, coaches, program leaders, policy makers, and parents or guardians. High-quality participation data can help inform resource allocation, facility and infrastructure planning, program design, and equity initiatives aimed at ensuring all children have opportunities to move, play, and belong. While Canada benefits from respected organizations (e.g., Statistics Canada and the Canadian Fitness and Lifestyle Research Institute (CFLRI)) and sporadic surveys (e.g., Rally Report, Change the Game Report) that provide valuable insights into sport and physical activity participation, there remains an opportunity to develop a more coordinated, comprehensive, and timely understanding of how youth engage in movement across school and community settings.
Therefore, the purpose of this article is threefold:
- To examine why sport and physical activity participation data matters;
- To explore how participation data are currently collected in Canada and how these approaches compare internationally; and,
- To highlight how improved participation data could support collaborative efforts to create more active, healthy, and inclusive school community environments for children and youth.
Why Sport and Physical Activity Participation Data Matters: Which students are being unintentionally excluded
“Sport has the power to shape lives and connect people in ways that very few things can.” (Canadian Heritage, 2026)
In Canada, sport, physical activity, and recreation strengthen communities, support well-being, and help young people develop important life skills such as teamwork, resilience, leadership, and communication (Canadian Women & Sport, 2024). PHE teachers see these benefits every day. Researchers consistently demonstrate that participation in sport and physical activity is associated with improved physical fitness, motor skill development, confidence, mental well-being, self-esteem, social connectedness, and academic success (Bruner et al., 2023; Eime et al., 2013; Holt et al., 2017; Malm et al., 2019; Sabiston et al., 2025). These benefits are particularly important during childhood and adolescence, when lifelong habits and identities related to movement are being formed (Bélanger et al., 2011, 2024). Students who are active during their school years are more likely to remain active throughout adulthood, while those who face barriers to participation early in life are more likely to experience ongoing challenges with physical activity and sport engagement (Bélanger et al., 2015, 2025).
Despite these well-established benefits, participation remains uneven. Physical activity levels in Canada continue to fall below recommended guidelines (ParticipACTION, 2024), and participation in organized sport varies considerably across regions, socioeconomic groups, genders, racialized communities, and disability identities (Ratna & Samie, 2017). Recent data from the CFLRI indicates that only 27% of Canadian adults and 68% of children and youth participate in organized sport (Canadian Fitness and Lifestyle Research Institute, 2024). Yet we don’t know how identity and other contextual factors intersect to shape students' experiences and opportunities over time, particularly in school settings.
This is where participation data becomes important. Participation data helps answer fundamental questions:
- Who is and who isn't participating?
- Where are participation gaps occurring?
- Which students are being intentionally or unintentionally excluded?
- What supports might encourage more young people to engage in sport and physical activity?
Schools are increasingly expected to justify decisions with evidence, yet they often have remarkably little evidence about sport and physical activity participation. Without reliable data, it becomes difficult to identify underserved groups, advocate for resources, evaluate programs, or tailor physical education (PE), intramurals, interscholastic (interschool) sport, and community-based opportunities to local needs. Better data does more than inform policies and strategies: it provides educators, school leaders, and community partners the information they need to make evidence-informed decisions that ensure every student has opportunities to develop fundamental skills and experience the health, social, and emotional benefits of sport and physical activity.
Canada’s Sport and Physical Activity Data Landscape: Canada lacks a coordinated, comprehensive picture of participation.
Canada’s approach to collecting, managing, and sharing high-quality sport and physical activity data is distributed across multiple organizations rather than coordinated through a single national system. At the national level, National Sport Organizations (NSOs) may collect participation data through their provincial and territorial members. However, these data are typically not publicly available; therefore, the value and utility of these data for broad decision-making, planning, and global comparisons are unknown. As such, two of the most important contributors to accessible national data trends are Statistics Canada and the CFLRI. For example:
- Statistics Canada periodically collects sport and physical activity indicators through large national health and social surveys. These surveys provide valuable national and provincial or territorial insights, but they often lack the level of detail needed to support community-level planning or school-specific decision-making.
- CFLRI specializes in monitoring physical activity, recreation, and sport participation through initiatives such as the Physical Activity and Sport Monitor and other targeted studies.
Together, Statistics Canada and the CFLRI provide some of Canada’s most trusted participation data and have helped establish an important foundation for understanding sport and physical activity across the country (Cathro et al., 2024; Craig et al., 2017).
In addition to national surveys, Canada has benefited from several large academic longitudinal studies that have followed children and youth over time. Examples include the Monitoring Activities of Teenagers to Comprehend their Habits (MATCH) study, the Nicotine Dependence in Teens (NDIT) study, and the COMPASS study (Bélanger et al., 2013; Leatherdale et al., 2014; O’Loughlin et al., 2014). These research initiatives have provided valuable insights into how participation in sport and physical activity changes across adolescence and have helped identify individual, social, school, and environmental factors that influence participation patterns over time. While these studies are not designed to provide nationally representative surveillance data, they have significantly advanced understanding of the determinants of sustained participation among Canadian youth.
However, the current system has limitations. Much of Canada’s participation data relies on surveys, which can be costly to administer, subject to self-report bias, and collected infrequently. As a result, the information often tells us what participation looked like years ago rather than what is happening today. Furthermore, participation data are most often disseminated through reports and summary tables, limiting opportunities for educators, researchers, and decision-makers to explore the data in ways that address local questions and priorities.
Perhaps most importantly for schools, much of Canada’s sport and physical activity data does not capture participation occurring within educational settings. PE classes, intramural programs, interscholastic (interschool) sport, and other school-based opportunities represent major points of access to movement for children and youth, yet participation in these settings is largely absent from national datasets. As a result, Canada lacks a coordinated and comprehensive picture of how youth engage in sport and physical activity across both school and community environments.
This gap has important implications for educators and school leaders. Without reliable participation data, it becomes difficult to identify which students are being reached, which students are being left behind, and where additional supports may be needed. It also limits the ability to advocate for resources, evaluate programs, monitor equity initiatives, and design opportunities that reflect the needs of local school communities. This challenge is particularly significant for students who rely on schools as their primary, or only, access point to sport and physical activity. As highlighted in 2025 PHE Canada’s advocacy work, ensuring equitable opportunities for all students remains both an urgent challenge and a significant opportunity for the education system (Davis & Razack, 2025).
International Sport and Physical Activity Data Systems: Learning that participation data can be more than a collection of statistics
Countries around the world use a variety of approaches to monitor sport and physical activity participation. Broadly speaking, these approaches fall into two categories: survey-based systems and registration-based systems.
- Survey-based systems are the most common and closely resemble Canada’s current approach. Even if these systems are subject to reporting bias and delays between data collection and reporting, national surveys, including in Canada, provide general insights into who participates in sport and physical activity and how participation changes over time. In addition to their survey data collection, some countries (e.g., New Zealand, Ireland, and Denmark) have enhanced accessibility to data through interactive dashboards and visualization tools. These platforms enable schools, municipalities, community organizations, and policymakers to explore participation trends and use data to inform local planning and decision-making. A national approach to sport and physical activity data in Canada could benefit from this type of user-friendly data observatory to securely and ethically connect existing datasets.
- Registration-based systems use administrative data collected directly through sport organizations. Scandinavian countries (e.g., Norway and Sweden), Germany, and parts of Australia have adopted versions of this model. Rather than relying solely on surveys, participation data is collected whenever an individual registers for a sport program or club. Because data collection is standardized across sports and organizations, these systems can provide a more detailed understanding of participation patterns over time. Physical Activity and Sport Insights (PASI) in Australia demonstrates how such data can be translated into actionable evidence, helping organizations understand trends and make more informed decisions about investment, policy, program delivery, and management. Consistent data captured objectively would help us better understand sport participation in Canada, including in schools. Norway offers one of the most advanced examples. Individuals who register in organized sport are included in a national sport registry, creating opportunities to examine participation across sports and throughout the lifespan. Norwegian researchers can also link sport participation information with broader education, health, and socioeconomic datasets. This level of integration makes it possible to better understand participation pathways, identify barriers to engagement, evaluate the impact of policies and programs, and examine how sport participation relates to broader health and educational outcomes (Methi et al., 2025, 2026). Although Canada's context differs substantially, the Norwegian example illustrates what becomes possible when participation data are systematically collected.
While no single system is perfect, international examples demonstrate that data can be more than a collection of statistics. When collected consistently and made accessible to end users, participation data becomes a powerful tool for supporting evidence-informed decisions in schools, communities, and sport organizations, helping to ensure all children and youth have high-quality sport and physical activity opportunities in school and their immediate communities. However, adopting other countries' approaches may neither be realistic nor desirable. Rather, Canada’s opportunity lies in learning from international best practices while building a coordinated approach that reflects our governance structures, respects contexts, and makes better use of the data already being collected.
New Data Tools for Canada: What becomes possible when participation data are integrated and accessible.
Until recently, Canadian educators, school boards, municipalities, and community organizations have had limited access to tools capable of examining participation patterns across important factors such as age, gender, race, socioeconomic status, and activity type. As a result, many decisions related to sport and physical activity programming have relied on fragmented information, anecdotal feedback, or periodic survey findings rather than comprehensive participation data.
While Canada’s jurisdictional structure makes the development of a highly integrated registration system, similar to those found in Scandinavia, unlikely, some progress is being made toward a more coordinated, accessible, and actionable sport participation data system. One example is CAN Active Insights, a collaborative initiative involving the CFLRI, the Canadian Parks and Recreation Association (CPRA), the Sport Information Resource Centre (SIRC), and ActiveXchange. In its current form, the platform combines sport participation data from CFLRI, recreation facility information from municipalities across Canada, demographic data from Statistics Canada, and real-time movement information from representative open data sources. As a rapidly evolving tool, there may be an opportunity for CAN Active Insights to also integrate school-based data on participation and infrastructure.
The significance of this approach extends beyond the creation of a new dashboard. By integrating information from multiple sectors, emerging tools begin to create a more complete picture of how Canadians participate in sport, physical activity, and recreation across their daily lives. As school-based participation is so important to many students’ sport and physical activity trajectories, schools and their sport infrastructure should be adequately represented within any sport data planning efforts. This is crucial to adequately represent children and youth whose participation spans multiple environments, including schools, municipal recreation programs, community organizations, and sport clubs. With a tool of this nature, evidence will also be available to support decisions about PE programming, intramurals, interscholastic (interschool) sport, facility investments, grant applications, and partnerships with community organizations. At a time when sport participation is sometimes criticized for taking students away from the classroom and when recess opportunities and PE daily instructional time are threatened, better data would allow these conversations to be guided by evidence rather than assumptions.
From Insight to Impact: Creating Sport Opportunities for Every Student
Canada’s complex sport and physical activity ecosystem requires the development of a national data infrastructure that is more coordinated, accessible, and actionable. For educators, this would be an important step forward, but strategic efforts will be required to ensure proper representation of school-based sport participation and infrastructure in new data systems. Access to more integrated data, which includes school-based information, will help answer critical questions about who is participating, who is not, and where additional supports may be needed. New data systems being developed in Canada have the potential to empower schools, communities, and policymakers to make more informed decisions about programming, resources, partnerships, and equity initiatives to benefit all students. While data alone cannot eliminate inequities and remove barriers to participation, if built properly, it can help identify gaps and guide action.
The Canadian education system routinely measures literacy, attendance, graduation, and academic achievement because these outcomes matter. The case has been made that participation in sport and physical activity is equally important for learning, belonging, health, and well-being. As such, sport participation, particularly within the school system, should be measured with the same commitment to support evidence-informed decision-making.
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