Oral health survey of 5 year old schoolchildren 2024
Results of the National Dental Epidemiology Programme (NDEP) survey, which took place in the school year ending 2024.
Applies to England
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The results of the oral health survey of 5 year old schoolchildren 2024 show:
- disparities at both regional and local authority levels for both prevalence and severity of dentinal decay
- overall 22.4% of 5 year old children in England had experience of obvious dentinal decay. This was lower than the finding of the previous survey of 5 year old schoolchildren in 2022, where 23.7% of the surveyed children had experience of dentinal decay
This survey takes place every 2 years in order to collect oral health information of 5 year olds who attend mainstream, state-funded schools across England. It was carried out as part of the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) National Dental Epidemiology Programme (NDEP). The protocol associated with this survey was published in September 2023.
The aim of the survey was to measure the prevalence and severity of dentinal caries among 5 year old schoolchildren within each lower-tier local authority. This was to provide information to local authorities, the NHS and other partners on the oral health of children in their local areas and to highlight any inequalities.
Updates to this page
Published 11 February 2025Last updated 5 March 2025 + show all updates
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In the 'Implication of results' section of the HTML report, the first sentence in the second paragraph was corrected to say 'more than 1 in 5 schoolchildren aged 5', rather than 'more than 1 in 4 schoolchildren aged 5'.
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Amended the 2nd sentence in the 4th paragraph of the 'Method' section of the HTML report to say 'The clinicians were calibrated for dentinal decay and standardised for the proxy measure for oral hygiene. Clinicians recorded the presence or absence of enamel caries.' Amended the first sentence of the 2nd paragraph under 'Prevalence of enamel and dentinal decay' in the 'Results' section to 'Taking into account children with any visually obvious decay (enamel or dentinal), just over a quarter of children were found to have experience of decay (26.9%) in England and this varied by region'. Corrected the definition of 'enamel decay' in the 'Glossary' worksheet of the data tables ODS file to say 'Percentage of children with enamel decay regardless of whether there is dentinal decay or not'.
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First published.