Sir, over this year's rather wet Easter holiday I caught up with some reading of the Journal and the section 'Other journals in brief' has really captured my eye. As a dental educator in an outreach primary care setting I found the reviews in Volume 224 No 5 by Paul Hellyer1 particularly apposite, discussing school interventions of oral health education and fluoride varnish application. I will certainly be challenging my new cohort of students, who undertake such activity in outreach,2 to read these abstracts during their induction at the University of Portsmouth Dental Academy.

On the other hand the reviewed papers by Reena Wadia3 on diabetes and periodontal markers, I found useful as a personal update in this developing area. Both these topics I feel are of relevance and must be outstanding resources and of value to our colleagues who are vocational educational supervisors faced with another year of giving their trainees up-to-date and relevant tutorials as another 980 or so new dentists qualify into vocational training this summer. Naturally some of the papers chosen are published in journals that do not have a policy of open access publishing but over the recent months, I have found the librarian at the BDA library a very user friendly outstanding resource for accessing journals that have proven difficult to access even with my recourse to the resources of King's College London.