Childhood Obesity in the North East 2006/07 National Child Measurement Programme

KEY MESSAGES

• The National Child Measurement Programme was established to annually weigh and measure all children from Reception and Year 6 in maintained schools across England.
• In the 2006/07 National Child Measurement Programme data was collected by all 12 Primary Care Trusts, providing a total of 47,264 records and a participation rate of 87% for Reception and 82% for Year 6.
• The North East would appear to have had one of the highest rates of whole school, as opposed to individual children, opting out of the measurement programme. However this may be attributed to anomalies in pupil denominators and data upload to the Information Centre.
• The 2006/07 data demonstrated the magnitude of obesity prevalence, which far exceeded that of underweight across the region.
• By population monitoring definition using the British 1990 classification, prevalence of obesity across the North East was significantly higher than the England average with 10.9% (11.6% boys & 10.0% girls) of Reception and 19.9% (21.3% boys & 18.5% girls) of Year 6 children classified as obese.
• Obesity prevalence was higher in boys than in girls (particularly for Year 6), although this may be accountable to possible higher participation rates in boys.
• Across the region, 4,341 children were identified as clinically obese (defined by the 98th centile) of these 1,553 were identified as extremely obese (defined by the 99.6th centile).
• Ethnicity data was poorly recorded across the region and prohibited any analyses within specific ethnic minority populations.
• In line with national findings, obesity prevalence in the North East was associated with deprivation (particularly in Year 6), although this relationship was not found to be statistically significant.
• Future data collection would benefit from improved ethnicity recording, higher whole school participation rates, and ensuring all submitted height and weight data are not rounded to the nearest decimal place.

The National Child Measurement Programme (NCMP), formerly known as the National Childhood Obesity Dataset, was established in 2005 and aims to annually weigh and measure all children from Reception (ages 4-5 years) and Year 6 (ages 10-11 years) in maintained schools across England. The programme, currently one of the largest of its kind internationally, provides population level surveillance data to analyse trends in the weight status of children, and inform local service planning and delivery. The NCMP is an intrinsic component of the recent cross Government strategy for England: Healthy Weight, Healthy Lives [1], and will be used to monitor progress towards the new ambition announced as part of the comprehensive Spending Review (September 2007): oeby 2020, we aim to reduce the proportion of overweight and obese children to 2000 levels. The North East data will also help to support the implementation of, and progress towards the regional health strategy: Better Health, Fairer Health [2].

National and regional findings from the first year of measurement (2005/06) were reported by Crowther et al [3] and NEPHO[4] respectively. Although response rates in the North East were the highest nationally in the first year of measurement, the experience gained during the first year informed a number of improvements to 2006/07 programme. These include: improved participation rates and consequently more accurate prevalence estimates; increased efficiency in data collection and validation; and the collection of more detailed information centrally. National headline results from the second (2006/07) measurement year were reported by the NHS Information Centre [5], with a more detailed analysis carried out by the National Obesity Observatory [6]. This report aims to provide an in-depth regional analysis of data from the North East 2006/07 NCMP.

• Obesity

• Child Nutrition
• Obesity