Back-to-School Season marks a high point in the parental mental-load calendar: ‘Do they have the right pencil case?’ ‘Do the t-shirts from last year still fit?’ ‘What’s the wraparound childcare situation and when do clubs start?'
Less likely to flag on the parental radar is the spectre of school weigh-ins and the so-called ‘ob*sity report card’. And look, I really don’t want to add to that parental mental load, especially in back-to-school season. But I think we need to talk.
The National Child Measurement Programme (NCMP) is a quaint British Institution sanctioned to surveil children’s bodies under the auspices of public ‘health’. Under this initiative, kids' heights and weights are measured in schools: once in Reception (age 4-5) and again in Year 6 (age 10-11). This information is used to to plot the BMI centile a kiddo fits onto, which is then interpreted in the context of cut-off points: indices that determine whether a child will be classified as ‘underweight’, ‘normal weight’,‘overweight’, or, ‘extremely overweight’.
To understand the NCMP, we need to back-up to its inauguration in 2006. At the time it was implemented, it was part of a broader range of strategies the New Labour government brought in to ‘halt the year on year rise in ob*sity amongst children aged under 11 by 2010’.
In the UK, there are two broad categories of programmes that gather data about a population; a monitoring programme seeks to describe trends in data, whereas a screening programme seeks to describe trends in data and provide feedback about those data to individuals. The ‘heel prick’ test offered to newborns and the weights noted in babies’ red books to make sure they are growing as expected after birth are two examples of screening programmes. Whereas monitoring or surveillance programmes have been established to track trends in outbreaks such as tuberculosis and to catch things like the recent detection of polio in sewage in London.
In its inception, the NCMP was proposed as a screening programme which sought to monitor trends in weight over the course of a child’s primary school tenure, and to flag to parents and carers if a child crossed the centile threshold of ‘overweight’ or ‘extremely overweight’. This meant it required authorisation from the National Screening Committee (NSC) to go ahead.
The NSC denied the NCMP screening status on the grounds that it did not have the potential to ‘do more good than harm’. That meant the NCMP had to be implemented as a monitoring programme instead, and that parents and children should not be made aware of the child’s weight or receive any advice about weight or health.
So, if the NCMP didn’t have authorisation to provide parents with their kids’ weight, where did the infamous ‘ob*sity report card’ come from?
Great question, I’d love to tell you.
In 2008 revisions were made to the NCMP to reclassify it as a screening programme - but not because the NSC thought they had made an oopsie. Nope, the NSC were still pretty adamant that the NCMP is a Very Bad Idea. So yeah, you guessed it. The NCMP was surreptitiously reclassified under a sweeping Health and Social Care Bill, introduced to Parliament in November 2007, that ratified a number of ‘tweaks’ in legislation and in the process, overrode the NSC’s concerns with NCMP. (Even today the NSC is pretty clear that it does not recommend a screening programme for childhood ob*sity)
