A report by the Health Select Committee has put schools at the heart of a raft measures designed to reduce child obesity. MPs have called for schools to screen children annually to detect if they are overweight. At present, they are only screened at school entry.
But Tam Fry, chairman of the Child Growth Foundation, which submitted evidence to the report, said current Government proposals, which promise a school nurse in every school without committing to a timeframe, threatened to scupper the measure.
"Without a huge influx of school nursing staff this measure can't work. It's enormously necessary to talk about extra staff in every school; 2,500 nurses into 33,000 schools is an unbelievably awful ratio. We need at least two or three times that.
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