IMD 2025: Jaywick again most deprived in England
If you live in England, your neighbourhood now sits on a new deprivation map. The English Indices of Deprivation 2025 (often shortened to IMD 2025) were published on Thursday 30 October 2025 and rank small areas across the country by the pressures they face. These official statistics guide how services and support are targeted.
The headline finding is familiar. A neighbourhood to the east of Jaywick, near Clacton‑on‑Sea in Essex, is once again ranked the most deprived in England. Seven of the 10 most deprived neighbourhoods are in Blackpool, underlining a pattern that has proved hard to shift. Most strikingly, 82% of areas that sat in the bottom tenth in 2019 are still there, and around 65% of local authorities now include at least one highly deprived neighbourhood.
Quick explainer so you can teach this well. The IMD combines seven types of disadvantage-income, employment, education, health, crime, barriers to housing and services, and the living environment-into a single score. These domains are weighted, with income and employment carrying the most weight. England is divided into small areas called Lower‑layer Super Output Areas (LSOAs); there are 33,755 of them in England, each covering around 1,500 people on average.
When you hear “deciles”, think tenths. After every neighbourhood is scored, all 33,755 are ranked and split into ten equal groups. Decile 1 is the 10% most deprived; decile 10 is the 10% least deprived. This is a relative scale: it shows where places stand compared with others, not whether an individual person is poor or a place has improved absolutely. That is why the 2025 results describe relative change since 2019 rather than a before‑and‑after verdict.
Where are pressures clustering? The familiar picture holds: concentrations of deep deprivation in parts of the North and Midlands, in several coastal towns, and in areas with a legacy of heavy industry-alongside sharply contrasting pockets in London. But there are also deprived neighbourhoods hidden within otherwise comfortable areas in every region, which is why local context always matters.
One update this year that educators and youth workers will want to sit with: analysis of the new index shows a sharp rise in neighbourhoods where almost all children live in low‑income households-280 areas now have more than 90% of children counted as income‑deprived, with 73 neighbourhoods at 99% or above. Inner London boroughs such as Hackney and Tower Hamlets feature heavily, while coastal and post‑industrial towns remain over‑represented. This frames urgent conversations about housing costs and child poverty.
For health, the pattern is equally sobering. The Office for Health Improvement and Disparities and ONS continue to show large gaps in healthy life expectancy between England’s most and least deprived areas-gaps that have widened since before the pandemic. For young readers and students, this is the clearest way to grasp what “deprivation” means in daily life: it shapes how long and how well people live.
What does this mean for Jaywick right now? Local leaders in Tendring say the index captures the scale of the challenge, while pointing to a 20‑year, £126m plan already adopted to improve housing, safety and jobs, and to flood‑defence work completed nearby. Residents often describe a strong community that looks out for one another; policy has to meet that energy.
How government says it will respond matters for classrooms, councils and community groups. Ministers have linked today’s picture to longer‑term action: a £500m Better Futures Fund focused on children’s development, an expansion of free school meals to all pupils in households on Universal Credit from the 2026 school year, and a new £1bn Crisis and Resilience Fund to reform emergency support. Use this data to follow the money-who gets help, where, and how quickly.
The IMD also feeds decisions on place‑based investment. The government’s Pride in Place programme, worth up to £5bn across the UK, is being directed using need metrics (including deprivation) to back high streets, shared spaces and local projects selected with residents. If you teach civic participation, this is a live case study in how data steers public spending.
Media literacy note for your class or team. Never use a rank to label people. In any “most deprived” area there are families doing okay-and in the “least deprived” places there are people struggling. Start with the domain breakdowns and the child and older‑people income measures (IDACI and IDAOPI) rather than only the headline rank, and always add lived experience. Clacton’s MP, Nigel Farage, represents the constituency that includes Jaywick; residents and leaders will understandably expect visible, practical support as the data lands.
And remember: England’s IMD is one of four UK measures. Wales updates its index on Thursday 27 November 2025, while Scotland is planning its next SIMD update for late 2026. If you’re in a border classroom or college, help learners compare methods, geographies and dates before drawing conclusions.