Beat the Street, a programme run by Intelligent Health, a system partner of ours, has reached 750,000 people in England and its director celebrates the milestone by reflecting on the initiative and what's ahead.
Since 2018, we’ve worked with Sport England towards a healthier, more inclusive society.
Becoming a system partner in 2022 has allowed us to develop a more direct relationship with local communities, which in turn has helped us create stronger partnerships and drive large-scale impact.
Through collaboration, Beat the Street evolved from a game into a community tool, improving public health through cross-sector partnerships and local engagement.
Beat the Street allows partners to engage across a community by working closely with people, local organisations and assets, such as parks and canals, to make a shift in behaviours and attitudes in order to deliver positive, lasting change.
At its core, Beat the Street is a free, real-life game designed to encourage people to move more, explore their local areas and connect with their communities.
Its purpose is to connect people to each other and their place and it works as a major event where the participants are the residents – whether these are adults or children.
The game takes part in social institutions – schools, workplaces and community groups – where people compete on leaderboards and have fun in the process.
In order to take part, participants register providing demographic and attitudinal data on how they move and how they feel about their place and their community.
Policy and practice
Our system work has helped us articulate the value movement and social connection has for people and our planet.
We believe that our social nature is core to us as humans and activity, civic or physical, can enable us to connect and thrive.
It also makes us care more about our environment.
At its core, Beat the Street is a free, real-life game designed to encourage people to move more, explore their local areas and connect with their communities.
We also believe that health is created in and by communities and that our role is to create supportive conditions to enable it.
We use our Sport England system partner funding to champion policy asks to improve health through movement, using insight to make the case and working closely with many partners to build a unified voice.
For 2025, our policy priorities are underpinned by these beliefs and the vision for a better future that must include children’s voices.
In a nutshell, our policy focus includes:
Creating healthy childhoods
Activating healthy and engaged communities
Designing healthy places
Nurturing thriving, natural environments
Walking, wheeling and cycling towards an active nation.
Driving systemic change at scale
We use our delivery funding to unlock local funding and support from public health, transport and integrated care board partners for places.
With at least 10% of the local population taking part, Beat the Street builds a narrative on how good health could be, with everyone working together with a clear purpose, using the programme as a platform to prototype new ways of working in a place.
The evidenced behavioural change continually benefits the participants well beyond the intervention, with positive outcomes lasting at least two years and possibly longer.
There is so much positive activity already happening in place, but it often is in siloes.
We now see that Beat the Street’s galvanising mechanics bring partners together, supporting policy and professional practices.
The programme also surfaces rich data and marginalised voices tackling structural inequalities by working with local institutions and assets, it enables people to act in ways that strengthen them both as individuals and their roles in the community.
We understand that Beat the Street's real impact is in social connection and increased feelings of belonging and trust across a place.
Ultimately, the programme has shown that even small, sustainable steps toward active living can have lasting impacts oncommunity health and social connectedness.
This sustainability manifests itself in three key ways:
Shared purpose – there is value and energy in bringing partners and community together, developing collective purpose.
Insight-led direction - using insight to inform next steps.
Behavioural change - building trust, a sense of belonging and agency for citizens that enable small changes in daily behaviour, now and in the future.
We're proud of what the programme has achieved so far. To date, Sport England’s Beat the Street has engaged 754,000 participants.
The programme has:
Achieved 10% of population engagement on average, comprising 48% adults and 52% children.
A third of participants (27%) belonged to areas of Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) 1 and 2 (the two most deprived areas in a classification of five areas in England). Out of the people reached, 69% are women and 19% have disabilities or a long-term health condition.
Engaged with 1042 schools, 1133 community groups and workplaces.
In terms of behavioural change, the data from 31,461 matched pairs across 31 Sport England games shows an average 9% decrease in adult inactivity and a 7% reduction in the proportion of less active children.
However, the greater change was seen in adults with a disability or long-term conditions, showing an 18% decrease in inactive adults and, for girls, a 9% decrease in less active.
But the impact goes beyond just physical activity as Beat The Street fosters social interaction, strengthens community ties and improves mental well-being.
We will also continue to work across the country, including a return to Burnley for the third time as they use Beat the Street to drive forward their collective Outdoor Town vision.
It’s been an incredible journey and eight years in it feels like we are only getting started!
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