Being overweight or obese causes hormonal changes, which accelerate children’s development. Obese children grow faster, so they tend to be taller than their healthy-weight peers. But obese children have a greater risk of disease in later life, including diabetes and heart disease.
Drawing on data obtained via Freedom of Information requests and official statistics, the researchers examined trends in child height and obesity up to the 2023/24 school year. Child obesity rates have increased in deprived areas, but decreased in more affluent areas, reflecting widening socioeconomic inequalities. Meanwhile, inequalities in height have reduced: poorer children still tend to be shorter than their wealthier peers, but the gap is narrowing. Children in poorer areas are getting taller on average and the researchers suggest this is because of their increasing rates of obesity.
In England’s most deprived areas, the average height of 11-year-old boys increased by 1.7cm from 144.4cm to 146.1cm in the fourteen years between 2009/10 to 2023/24. The proportion of these children who were overweight or obese increased from 37.7% to 43.3% in the same period.
‘It might look like a simple good news story, as on average children in Britain are getting taller,’ says GP and researcher Andrew Moscrop of Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences. ‘But in fact it’s a complex bad news story, because this trend is mostly due to height changes among poorer children, and these are being driven by increases in obesity prevalence, which are themselves driven by unfair determinants of health.
‘Children in poorer areas are exposed to more unhealthy food outlets and fewer healthy food sources, while they have less access to outdoor spaces and safe streets for exercise. Additionally, the children’s services that were intended and demonstrated to support children’s healthy weight have been cut back, with deeper cuts in deprived areas.
‘Addressing these issues demands eradicating child poverty and reducing inequalities, while also addressing the environments our children grow up in.’
A sudden increase in average child height occurred among all children during the COVID-19 pandemic, alongside a sudden rise in obesity prevalence, due to the reduced opportunities for outdoor exercise and less healthy eating patterns. Among girls aged 11 in England, average height jumped from 146.6cm to 148.0 between school years 2019/20 and 2020/21, while prevalence of overweight and obesity among this age group increased in the same period from 35.2 to 40.9%.
Focus on child height intensified after reports in 2023 claimed British children were ‘shrinking’. These media reports prompted a government statement in January 2024 asserting that data ‘demonstrated growth.’ The researchers say the data suggesting children were ‘shrinking’ was inaccurate, while the government statement was misleading because they quoted data from the COVID-related height increase.
Child Measurement Programmes routinely measure the height and weight of every child during their first year of state education in Britain. In England, approximately 600,000 children aged 4-5 are measured annually, while smaller numbers are measured in Scotland (50,000 to 55,000) and Wales (30,000 to 35,000). Children in England are also measured aged 10-11, in their final year of primary education.
The authors of the paper are GP and researcher Andrew Moscrop of Oxford’s Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, Danny Dorling, Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oxford, and Tim Cole, Emeritus professor of medical statistics, UCL.
The paper, ‘‘British children are not shrinking’, but child height is increasing for the wrong reasons: trends and inequalities in child measurement programme data for England, Scotland and Wales’, is published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
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