Dental experts have welcomed the Labour Party’s pledge to implement a supervised toothbrushing scheme during ‘fully funded’ breakfast clubs.
In October the Labour Party announced a pledge to introduce supervised toothbrushing in schools. However, the policy faced backlash from teachers who felt that it would disrupt their lessons.
One Hertfordshire primary school teacher said: ‘It shouldn’t be our job to check that they clean their teeth every day. It takes away from learning time.’
Labour has now clarified that the supervised brushing scheme would take place outside of lesson time in ‘fully-funded breakfast clubs’. The party hopes to improve childhood oral health and ensure ‘every child gets a healthy meal to start the day’.
Preventative care
Labour leader Keir Starmer emphasised the benefit of this strategy for preventive healthcare. In an opinion piece for The Guardian he said: ‘If we let children grow up overweight, with poor mental health and rotten teeth, we are not only harming their life chances, but adding a huge burden on the NHS and making the chances of delivering a more prosperous economy that much harder.’
He continued: ‘That is what our national health mission is about – to get the NHS back on its feet by reforming the NHS and providing a new focus on prevention.’
The British Dental Association (BDA) said it ‘welcomed’ this announcement. The association cited data from Public Health England which suggests that targeted schemes could generate £3.06 in reduced need for treatment for every pound spent.
BDA chair Eddie Crouch said: ‘Supervised brushing is a tried and tested policy, that the Government’s own modelling shows pays for itself. It’s a scandal that decay remains the number one reason for hospital admissions among young children. Prevention isn’t just better than cure it’s cheaper too.’
‘The nanny state in action’
Plans for a supervised brushing scheme have been critiqued by Conservative politicians as part of a ‘nanny state’.
During his Political Currency podcast, former chancellor George Osborne said: ‘Keir Starmer’s gone and spent the money on 700,000 extra dentist appointments and what he tells us is supervised toothbrushing. That really is the nanny state in action. Literally supervising our toothbrushing.’
Speaking before a children’s hospital visit, Keir Starmer defended the policy against these criticisms. He said: ‘The moment you do anything on child health, people say “you’re going down the road of the nanny state”. We want to have that fight.’
He added: ‘Tooth decay, stunted growth and stalling life expectancy should be consigned to the history books, but instead they’re the reality of Tory Britain. The biggest casualty of the short-term, sticking-plaster politics of the last 14 years are our nation’s children. My Labour government will turn this around.’
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