School dental service

Dental screening network in UK

The School Dental Service was a county council network of dental screening for children at school in UK in the mid-20th century. In some areas it is now known as a community dental service.

History

A School Dentists Society had been set up in November 1898 for private school dentists, by Sidney Spokes of University College London.^[1]

Sedley Taylor of Cambridge in February 1907, a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, gave £500 for the care of the teeth of children attending Cambridge Council schools,^[2]^[3] at the first school dental clinic, the Cambridge Dental Clinic, operating at 12a Park Side from August 1907. In the first year, around 2,500 children were inspected, and around 1,000 children were treated.^[4] The scheme was taken over by the Corporation of Cambridge from 1 April 1909. The dental officer was paid £300. The children would be largely of the ages from 5 to 9.^[5]

Some other local authorities followed Cambridge. The Education Act 1918 had nominal provision for dental treatment for children at school.

It was the Education Act 1944 that made it compulsory for children at primary and secondary schools to have dental inspections in England and Wales. The provision of a school dental service mostly appeared after the Second World War, and until the end of the 1980s.

School dental services were operating in the early 1980s, but from the 1980s the services were subsumed by NHS community dental services; often this was a reduced service. In 1982, there were on average 6,000 schoolchildren, per district dental officer, in England and Wales.^[6]

By the late 1980s, due to advances in toothpaste, and lowering of typical rates of dental treatment amongst children, the provision of having a schools dental service was seen as much less of a priority, than in the 1950s, when advances in toothpaste had not occurred. Some schools had vastly better dental health than others.

In the 1980s three dental schools were closed, as the government predicted that there would be too many dentists; by the late 1990s there began to be a wide shortage of qualified dentists across the UK. Affluent areas, such as Cheshire, had good and improving dental health, but deprived areas, such as Manchester, did not.^[7]

Operation

Each county would have an area or district dental officer, who would run the county school dental service.^[8] In 1952 there were 827 school dental officers.^[9]

In Warwickshire, a dentist would visit a secondary school twice a week, and a child would have two check ups a year, with an individual dental record card.^[10]

A county education authority would run the service, later replaced by the regional health authority from 1974, often known as the Community Dental Service.