Review of children referred from the school vision screening programme in Kettering during 1976-8.

The progress of 108 children who were identified by the vision screening programme in school as having defective vision (excluding those with puberty onset myopia) was reviewed. Treatment of these children resulted in improvement in visual acuity of the worst eye (two lines or better) for 16 children. Eighteen children had severe amblyopia (6/24 or worse). Among these the vision of only five was improved by treatment. Two thirds of the children had refractive errors in the better eye which required correction. It seems sensible to identify and treat children with bilateral refractive errors, but the need to treat children with lesser degrees of amblyopia is questioned.