As a qualified early years teacher, an academic interested in teacher retention, and also as a person who recently had an extremely decayed wisdom tooth removed at Birmingham Dental Hospital, I was very interested in the recent policy announcement from England around supervised tooth-brushing in nurseries and primary schools. England is currently in the midst of an oral health crisis, with nearly 25 per cent of five-year-olds nationally suffering dental decay (DfE, 2025) – some of whom will probably grow up to be adults like me, who despite brushing their teeth twice a day, seem to have limited success with it.

The Department for Education (DfE) reports that their new supervised tooth-brushing programme ‘is expected to save the NHS millions of pounds that would otherwise be spent on treating dental disease in children’ (DfE, 2025). Of course, such economic savings would also mean a reduction in pain and discomfort experienced by young children suffering dental decay. You may be surprised to read, therefore, that when the idea was first floated by the UK Labour Party as a manifesto commitment in 2024, I wrote a blog piece detailing my concerns – and my feelings haven’t changed.

What about the teacher supply crisis?

‘Making teachers supervise tooth-brushing not only adds to their workload, but also asks them to take on a new role – that of a proxy dentist.’

I doubt the wisdom of adding yet another responsibility to teachers’ long list of things to do at a time when we are suffering problems in both the recruitment and retention of teachers. High workload is one of the key reasons teachers give for leaving the profession (McLean et al., 2024). However, teacher workload is a more complex beast than politicians, newspaper articles and the results of copious quantitative surveys on teachers’ working hours might suggest. Policymakers would benefit from engaging with Greg Thompson and Anna Hogan’s recently published edited collection, Teaching and Time Poverty: Understanding Workload and Work Intensification in Schools (2025), which theorises workload as a quantitative issue, and intensification as a qualitative one. Whereas workload concerns the amount of work teachers must complete, intensification is about the nature of this work. Making teachers supervise tooth-brushing not only adds to their workload, but also asks them to take on a new role – that of a proxy dentist. Increases in both workload and intensification contribute to teachers’ feelings of time poverty, which are not conducive to teacher retention, commitment or wellbeing.

‘Irresistible’ policy

Teaching unions have also argued that there should be a limit to what is expected of schools in terms of addressing the oral health crisis. But resisting such policies is, admittedly, difficult. After all, what could be bad about wanting children to have better oral health? It seems this policy is irresistible, for want of a better word. In this respect, I am reminded of Lee Edelman’s No Future, in which he warns that the image of the child is a ‘coercive universalization [which] serves to regulate political discourse’ (Edelman, 2004, p. 11). Any act perceived to damage the child ultimately risks being judged as a threat to the established social order. There is more than tooth enamel at stake here. This policy is an example of how, over the past 30 years, teachers have been made responsible for an ever-increasing number of societal ills (Easthope & Easthope, 2000). The consequence of this increasing responsibilisation, I would argue, appears to have been to render the teaching profession more and more stressful and unattractive.

‘Teachers are wonderful, but expecting them to do everything (including cleaning children’s teeth) is unrealistic – and likely contributes to our crisis in teacher retention.’

Teachers are not dentists. Expecting teachers to take on ever more roles does no one any favours. Not only does it spread teachers too thin, contributing to psychological burnout (Lawrence et al., 2018), but it also diminishes the skills and knowledge of other professionals whose roles teachers are expected to take on – in this case dental hygienists, who would make excellent dental experts to supervise toothbrushing in school settings. Furthermore, in the case of this policy, much more should also be said about the far greater responsibility of food manufacturers who target ultra-processed, sugary foods at parents and their unsuspecting toddlers. However, we have too little space here to address this particular behemoth.

Teachers are wonderful, but expecting them to do everything (including cleaning children’s teeth) is unrealistic – and likely contributes to our crisis in teacher retention.

References

Department for Education [DfE]. (2025). Supervised toothbrushing for children to prevent tooth decay (Press release). https://www.gov.uk/government/news/supervised-toothbrushing-for-children-to-prevent-tooth-decay#:~:text=The%20supervised%20toothbrushing%20programme%20will,to%20develop%20positive%20brushing%20habits

Edelman, L. (2004). No future: Queer theory and the death drive. Duke University Press.

Easthope, C., & Easthope, G. (2000). Intensification, extension and complexity of teachers’ workload. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 21(1), 43–58. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425690095153

Lawrence, D. F., Loi, N. M., & Gudex, B. W. (2018). Understanding the relationship between work intensification and burnout in secondary teachers. Teachers and Teaching, 25(2), 189–199. https://doi.org/10.1080/13540602.2018.1544551

McLean, D., Worth, J., & Smith, A. (2024). Teacher labour market in England annual report 2024. National Foundation for Educational Research. https://www.nfer.ac.uk/publications/teacher-labour-market-in-england-annual-report-2024/

Thompson, G., & Hogan, A. (Eds.). (2025). Teaching and time poverty: Understanding workload and work intensification. Routledge.