Every year, the government weighs and measures children in Reception (ages 4-5) and Year 6 (ages 10-11). The National Child Measurement Programme isn’t always popular with parents but it gives us priceless public health information on hundreds of thousands of children. With such a robust data set, it gives us the ability to look at how children change over time and test some of the theories that get thrown around about childhood growth and obesity.
During the summer, a report from the Food Foundation claimed that the average height of five year olds was falling and had been since 2013. Gordon Brown thundered that this was down to ‘food bank Britain’ and experts previously ascribed this to government austerity in the 2010s.
But is this actually true? This is what the government data shows:
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