Capacity theft describes the systematic transfer of institutional obligation onto families when schools fail to meet a disabled child’s needs, consuming the finite energy, time, and resources that families need to sustain their own lives. Posts under this tag examine how schools steal bandwidth from families in multiple directions: children who arrive home depleted, dysregulated, and unable to cope because their school day lacked meaningful access or accommodation, forcing families to absorb the regulatory and emotional labour the school refused to resource; endless meetings, administrative hurdles, and bureaucratic processes that consume parental capacity under the guise of collaboration; and the imposition of prerequisites — private assessments, specialist referrals, therapeutic activities, behaviour tracking — that families must complete before the school will provide the support it already owes. Each of these practices treats family capacity as an inexhaustible subsidy for institutional failure. A disabled child’s right to educational access exists at the schoolhouse door; families carry no legal obligation to perform supplementary labour outside of school as a condition of their child receiving adequate support within it. Capacity theft names the mechanism through which schools externalise their resourcing deficits onto the people least able to absorb them, ensuring that institutional underfunding is experienced as private exhaustion.