School call to fight child obesity

Ros Godson, from the Community Practitioners' and Health Visitors' Association (CPHVA), will call for every school to have its own equipment to weigh and measure children.

She will also say that school nurses should be given a dedicated area to work to ensure confidentiality.

Health Secretary Alan Johnson said efforts to promote exercise and healthy eating had to go "further and faster" in response to the stark findings of a new Government study.

The Foresight research, commissioned in 2005 to help ministers understand the scale of the problem, warned half the population will be obese within 25 years if current trends continue.

Ms Godson will tell delegates at the National Obesity Forum's (NOF) fifth annual conference, in London: "Only last week we heard that the young are getting fatter and in some areas of the country, a third of children are leaving primary school overweight. As we know that the heaviest children are less likely to have been weighed, we can assume that these figures are underestimating the scale of problem."

"School nurses already play a vital role in the fight against childhood obesity and are ideally placed to support the national effort to reduce it.

"There is a need for health education in the home and at school but, as the situation stands, we have neither the team, time, recourses nor remit to maximise this opportunity."

She will emphasise the value of linking health education to the National Child Measurement Programme (NCMP), saying: "Just weighing and measuring children is a precious waste of time; it teaches nothing and provides no support to those that need help.

"Ideally we need to tie it in with the work done in class, with the Healthy Schools Programme, to find a way for the health and education disciplines to work together and secure a robust prevention, treatment and referral system."