This is one of a series of reports prepared under the provisions of the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 . The Act requires all statistics currently designated as National Statistics to be assessed against the Code of Practice for Official Statistics . The report covers the set of statistics produced by the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) derived from the Dental Health Survey of Children and Young People, 2013 (Children’s Dental Health).

Since the survey is run only every ten years, this Assessment has taken place ahead of the publication of the main survey outputs. The Assessment of the survey outputs has therefore been based on a skeleton of a summary statistical report, due for publication in February 2015.

Section 3 of this report adopts an ‘exception reporting’ approach – it includes text only to support the Requirements made to strengthen compliance with the Code and Suggestions made to improve confidence in the production, management and dissemination of these statistics. This abbreviated style of report reflects the Director General for Regulation’s consideration of aspects of risk and materiality . The Assessment team nonetheless assessed compliance with all parts of the Code of Practice and has commented on all those in respect of which some remedial action is recommended.

This report was prepared by the Authority’s Assessment team, and approved by the Regulation Committee on behalf of the Board of the Statistics Authority, based on the advice of the Director General for Regulation.

Statistics on Children’s Dental Health: Letter of Confirmation as National Statistics