Education Minister Graham Cregeen has warned against using statistics on overweight children in a way that could identify and stigmatise individual pupils.

He sounded the caution after he was asked what progress the Department of Education, Sport & Culture had made in collating height and weight figures for year six children (aged 10-11) in the Isle of Man.

The question was posed by Daphne Caine (Garff), who has been calling for greater action on childhood obesity, in the House of Keys on Tuesday.

Mr Cregeen said: ’The department is not collecting this data, this is a matter for public health.

’I am in discussions with the minister for health regarding this but we need to ensure that this data is anonymised.

’We do not wish to see children stigmatised because they have been put in some sort of league table.’

Last year a complete breakdown of height and weight measurements for reception class children was published following a question from Mrs Caine.

They were issued - by the health department - on a school-by-school basis, causing concern that the statistic could cause children to be identified, particularly coupled with already published information on class sizes.

Mrs Caine insisted: ’Nobody would wish children to be stigmatised because of the proportion of overweight children in a particular school.’

Methodology used in Britain was ’tried and trusted’ she said. ’So why has it not been possible, in more than a year, for this to be collected in the island?’

Asked about the difference from other anonymised health data, Mr Cregeen said: ’The information we have had from public health is that they had concerns whether they could keep the information anonymised and it wouldn’t come out via a freedom of information request.’

The 2017 Healthy Island Report called for monitoring of the height and weight of children in reception and year six.

Mrs Caine was told last year, in a written answer from Mr Ashford, that arrangements were unlikely to be in place to measure year six pupils in the 2018-19 school year.

The overall figures for reception children in 2016-17 showed 25.1% of four and five-year-olds were classed as either overweight or obese.