All children to get flu spray

I have immense concerns in terms of the human resources required to deliver this.

School nurses are already very hard stretched and come nowhere near delivering the basics from the Healthy Child Programme. If this is just added into their workload, it will devastate their morale.

If it is carried out by lay personnel, is this appropriate? Giving immunisations involves much more than just administering the vaccine, but counselling parents and, where appropriate, the young people. Lay people would not have the knowledge to do this

Although children don't die of flu as often as old people do, they can get sick enough to require hospitalisation. Many others are ill enough to require time off school which is disruptive for them and their families. Children also spread flu to other children and to adults including school staff and their families. Preventing flu in children should benefit all children and others too.

It's not any safer. Both ways of giving vaccines - by injection or by nasal spray are very safe. The nasal vaccine is different from injected vaccine. The spray contains a live but weakened form of the flu virus and actually causes a very mild flu infection. The injected vaccine contains only killed virus.

The vaccine needs to be given in October or November before the flu season starts. Vaccine won't prevent flu once you have got it. But if your child had flu last winter, it's still a good to get the vaccine this autumn, because the virus, and the vaccine, can change a bit every year.

We accept the advice of our expert committee that rolling out a wider programme could further protect children, with even a modest take-up helping to protect our most vulnerable.

There are significant challenges to delivering a programme that requires up to nine million children to be vaccinated during a six-week period and we will look at the recommendations in detail to decide how best to develop and deliver the programme.