The Data Drop: Which school clubs are the most popular?

The Data Drop is back! And this time we’ve taken a look at which clubs are the most popular across primary and secondary schools.

For those that are new here, The Data Drop is our series of blogs where we share insights from our data warehouse (containing the data of over 7,000 schools.)

In this edition, we explored how many schools have different kinds of clubs (excluding breakfast, wraparound and homework clubs.) Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most popular club for all phases was Football Club. As you can see from the lists below, football wasn’t the only club that made it into the top ten of both phases. Though they rank differently for each phases, choir, art, dance, netball, and theatre were among the most popular clubs for both primary and secondary.

Some of the differences are endearingly reflective of phase. From primary to secondary, lego gets swapped for chess, while rugby and badminton are favoured over the younger dodgeball and gym.

Other fun facts about school club popularity:

• Board games clubs made it into the top 20 for both primary and secondary
• Dungeons and Dragons club came in at 13 for secondary schools
• Archery was ranked the 22nd most popular club for primary schools
• Puzzles and UNO clubs were also popular across all schools

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Methodology

Our data warehouse holds the anonymised data of Arbor’s schools.

Rules:

• We pulled data from schools who have at least one club: 3528 primaries and 621 secondaries
• We have removed club names where the club name free text appears to be used for trips, interventions, revision sessions etc
• We have only included data on primary and secondary schools as there is not enough data on other types
• If a school has five art clubs, e.g. one per year group, they have only been counted once