Best Practice

Safeguarding: What is affluent neglect?

Safeguarding Pupil wellbeing Parental engagement
What is affluent neglect, why do we need to be aware of this phenomenon, and how do we spot the signs? Elizabeth Rose offers some practical pointers for school safeguarding teams
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Neglect is a persistent failure to meet a child’s physical and/or psychological needs. It is the most common form of abuse in the UK and around 1 in 10 children have been neglected.

Neglect can include failing to provide adequate food, shelter or medical attention, failing to ensure a child is properly supervised and could include a neglect of a child’s basic emotional needs.

The updates to the statutory guidance Working together to safeguard children (DfE, 2023) also include a “failure to provide suitable education” within the definition of neglect.

Schools spend a considerable amount of time discussing neglect with staff throughout the year and the number of police-recorded child cruelty offences is increasing – which may be due to earlier and more effective identification and reporting (see NSPCC, 2024).

However, preventing and addressing neglect remains a significant challenge, both within school and wider child protection practice.

 

Affluent neglect

One area of neglect which may not be covered in as much detail in staff training or might even be overlooked by staff is “affluent neglect”, which is a term commonly used to describe the neglect experienced by children living in more wealthy families.

This does not always include the physical signs that staff are more familiar with – such as children being unwashed, in inadequate clothing, or experiencing untreated dental problems – so may be harder to spot and very challenging to improve.

Parents may also have the ability and resources to conceal this form of neglect, by threatening legal action or raising complaints to prevent social workers from doing their jobs, for example.

However, affluent neglect can have a significant and damaging impact on children in the same way that other forms of neglect do, and a robust response must be put in place where there are concerns.

 

Types of affluent neglect

Research (Bernard, 2018) has suggested that affluent neglect can be difficult to spot and hard to evidence because the physical signs of neglect are not usually present.

Children may have access to education, out-of-school opportunities, good housing, material goods, and food, but they may experience neglect in relation to emotional nurturing or supervision. Things to look out for include:

Lack of supervision: Children may be cared for by others outside the family due to significant parental work commitments, which may include paid carers or children “sofa-surfing” between friends’ houses. Parents may also have a more relaxed attitude to drug and alcohol-use in children or may not know that their children are abusing substances because they are not frequently present.

Emotional neglect: As parents may not be physically present, they may be unable to provide emotional support. Parents may also have excessively high expectations of children’s academic attainment and put pressure on them as a result. Research has shown that both of these adverse childhood experiences are present in more affluent families (Bellis et al, 2014) and have a long-lasting impact on children.

Parental substance misuse, domestic abuse and parental mental health issues: Any parent can suffer from addiction and/or mental health problems, and domestic abuse can happen in all kinds of intimate relationships. We know that if a child is living in a family where any or all of these factors are present then they are more likely to suffer significant and lasting harm.

 

Three ways that schools can work to protect children

1, Understanding the issue

Reading available research and understanding what affluent neglect is and what it looks like is crucial to being able to identify it. A key part of this is understanding what different forms of neglect look like and being able to identify the emotional side of the issue.

Knowing children and families well, having open dialogue with children where they can talk about their experiences, and teaching children about healthy relationships within families can help to support everyone to better understand the issue in both direct and indirect ways.

 

2, Effective staff training

Consider how you approach training staff about neglect and how detailed your explanation of affluent neglect is.

Is it as effective as possible? Does it equip staff with the skills to identify affluent neglect?

The NSPCC statistics cited above tell us that less that 1% of Childline counselling sessions are about neglect despite it being the most common form of abuse in the UK, which could indicate that children are not able to identify that they are being neglected. Staff need to know what to look for and how to raise these concerns where necessary.

 

3, Addressing possible bias and misconceptions

Reflecting on our own (and wider systemic) bias is essential to ensuring that each individual child is protected. There are preconceptions that perpetuate the idea that child protection work always involves lower income families and this can lead to differing expectations and concerns going unchallenged with more affluent parents.

While we should recognise that there are significant challenges for families living in poverty and deprivation, this does not mean that abuse, neglect and exploitation can’t or don’t happen within families with higher incomes.

Drawing on the understanding and training discussed above, it is important for those working in safeguarding in schools to have space to reflect on cases, children and concerns fully to explore whether there might be more happening to a child than initially meets the eye – and to re-evaluate whether there are different parenting expectations for affluent parents when compared with lower income families.

For example, do we accept children sofa-surfing in wealthier families (perhaps because parents are working abroad) when we would raise this as a serious concern in a lower income family? This reflection could be approached through:

  • External supervision: High-quality supervision provides a safe and structured space for reflection, analysis and action-planning. It enables a supervisee to challenge potential bias and reflect deeply on cases to ensure that children are adequately protected and consider if the systems that are in place are able to do this.
  • In-school discussion and case review: Regularly timetabling case review meetings with the safeguarding team can provide space to look at children in detail, review child protection files, and consider what information may be missing or if things may have been overlooked. It also helps to ensure that expectations of care for children are the same within all professionals in the safeguarding team and provides valuable space for development.

 

Final thoughts

The key takeaway when considering affluent neglect is to think about the expectations of the standard of emotional and physical care that children should receive and ensure that you are tenacious in working to make sure that all receive the nurturing that they deserve.

Reflecting on your approach to this form of neglect and how you approach it in staff training this year will further strengthen your safeguarding approach.

 

Further information & resources