Does Overbooking and Overscheduling of Children Amount to Neglect?
🏷️ From £90
🎧 Safeguarding leads and DSLs, school leaders and pastoral teams, social workers and child protection professionals, educational psychologists and clinicians, policy makers and researchers, parents interested in understanding the wellbeing implications of overscheduling.
📍 Online
🎥 Watch live or on catch up
Exploring “Affluent Neglect”, Shadow Education and the Hidden Risks to Child Wellbeing
In an increasingly competitive global landscape, parents are investing more time, money and energy into securing their children’s futures. Shadow education, including private tutoring and intensive extracurricular enrichment programmes are now growing rapidly worldwide. For many families, these interventions are viewed as essential stepping stones toward admission to elite universities and access to global career opportunities.
But at what point does opportunity become overload?
This thought-provoking webinar explores whether chronic overbooking and overscheduling of children may cross a safeguarding threshold, and whether, in some cases, it could amount to a form of neglect.
Key Themes
- The Rise of Shadow Education and Competitive Parenting
- Affluent Neglect: A Hidden Safeguarding Issue
- Overscheduling, Anxiety and Burnout
- The balance between structured and unstructured time
We will explore:
- The psychological and physiological impacts of chronic busyness
- Links between overscheduling and anxiety disorders
- The safeguarding implications of exhaustion and emotional overload
So where is the healthy balance? And who decides?
Learning Outcomes
By the end of this webinar, participants will:
- At what point does high expectation become harmful pressure?
- How should schools, safeguarding leads, clinicians and policy makers respond when harm occurs in affluent, high-performing contexts?
- Is this a parenting choice or a child protection issue?
Speaker: Dr Patrick Alexander
Dr Patrick Alexander is Professor of Education and Anthropology at Oxford Brookes University, where he is Research Lead for Education and Chair of the Children and Young People Research Network. Patrick has over twenty years of experience conducting in-depth research in schools across the world, with a focus on understanding how children and young people are socialised into particular ways of being through the experience of schools. An important part of this work is his research into young people’s experiences of time-use and how their activities both in school and outside of school link to particular imaginings of what the future will look like. Patrick’s latest book, School’s Out Forever: Provocations for the Futures of Education, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2026.
