Experts say downward trend is slight, pointing to growing gap between better and worse-off children, and urge government to wake-up to obesity figures.
Fewer obese children are starting in school reception classes in England, according to results from the school measurement programme, but a fifth still start their school life overweight and a third are overweight or obese by the time they leave for secondary school.
In the last year, 9.1% of children starting reception were obese, compared with 9.5% in 2013-14, according to the health and social care information service that collects the data from the national school measurement programme. In 2005-6 when significant data was first collected, the figure was 9.9%.
Over a fifth of the children (21.9%), who are aged four and five, are still overweight or obese, but that, again, is a drop from last year, when it was 22.5%. More
