Policy and Procedure No. 48
Oral Health
Millfield Pre-School provides care for children and promotes health through promoting oral health and hygiene, encouraging healthy eating, healthy snacks and good self-care. We will encourage families to seek dentist care for their children to maintain good habits and oral health.
- Fresh drinking water is always available.
- The pre-school only offers water to refill bottles. We encourage parents to send their child into setting with water.
- Only milk and water are offered at snack time, never squash, fruit juice or fizzy drinks.
- We encourage water bottles, not milk bottles. We will offer them an alternative if a child brings one to setting.
- Children are offered healthy and nutritious snacks, twice a day. This includes salad vegetables, fresh fruit, dried fruit, plain biscuits and crackers, natural yoghurt, bagels or croissants with cream cheese.
- We follow the government guidelines and encourage parents to do the same in terms of food to avoid packing in lunch boxes.
- We strongly discourage chocolate, sweets or fizzy drinks within lunchboxes and will send these back home, offering them something else instead.
Dummies
We understand children may have a dummy as a comforter; however, it can affect a child’s oral health and speech and language development. Once a child has settled, we will put the dummy in the child’s bag. If a dummy is damaged, this will stay in the child’s bag, and we will let parents/carers know. We will support families is reducing dummy use if appropriate.
Signed: Clara Hall- Chairperson
Signed: Tegan Kidman- Lead Practitioner/Manager.
Reviewed: 11th February 2026
Review: 11th February 2027.