Recent months required children's academic learning to take place at home like never before
Even prior to the coronavirus pandemic, most parents and children would have experienced a stressful evening on the back of a difficult, frustrating or uncertain homework task. I confess that as a child I rather enjoyed homework but can still recall the tears and shouting it could induce in my household during the younger years of my time at secondary school.
Back then, Religious Education often seemed to be the cause. Perhaps the questions posed were just too difficult? How could I – a twelve-year-old – answer them when neither my parents nor thousands of years of profound thought and religious experience could? Excessive stress does not create optimal conditions for learning. However, research indicates that when deployed effectively, homework is likely to have a positive impact on student achievement. It shouldn’t be set simply to follow blindly a timetable or school policy.
Homework should have a clear academic purpose explicitly stated. This aids student motivation and can be helpful for parents to understand what is being pursued. Homework can be undertaken for a variety of reasons, including to help teachers check students’ understanding as well as practice and application for students. With care, homework can also be used for pre-learning – to check for existing knowledge or understanding and possible misconceptions prior to new learning. Some caution should be sounded here. For some children and their parents, new learning can be particularly disorientating and therefore is not always suited to the home environment. Good homework is not disconnected from the ongoing learning that is taking place in school. It should form an integral part of that learning and complement it rather than being a one-off or standalone activity. It can also be helpful where homework tasks introduce elements of choice for children as this gives them greater agency and can aid their motivation. Homework divides parental opinion and particularly the extent to which it should or shouldn’t occupy children’s lives outside of school. It’s not unusual for different parents with children in the same class to complain at the same time of too much and too little homework. What may take one child five minutes can – for a variety of reasons – take another 40 minutes – perhaps because they are struggling with the task or are being overly conscientious. A few years ago, around our launch of a new online homework platform, we held a series of parent events that discussed and sought parental views on homework.
It became clear that one parent’s too much is another’s too little and we quickly realised that it is not possible to keep everyone happy when it comes to homework. Some homework can be overkill: 30 questions when ten would do; a five-page assignment when something much shorter would also aid learning and assessment. Less can be more.
It can be useful for homework to be designed as time- rather than task-based. Parameters such as ‘this should take you around 15 minutes but don’t spend longer than 30 minutes’ can be helpful to both students and parents. We have always advised as a school that if homework is becoming an undue source of stress and upset, stop and send the teacher a note to this effect. The issue can always be picked up in class the next day. How much should parents assist children with homework? Parental ‘help’ – sometimes subcontracted to private tutors – almost always derives from the best intentions. Where this ‘support’ oversteps the mark, it can distort the picture and send children forward with shaky foundations. What can be more helpful is for parents to involve themselves, assisting with organisation – particularly for boys – or offering feedback where invited, but not doing it for them. Homework shouldn’t require parents to attempt to teach. This can be confusing for children particularly where methodologies may be different. Tasks should not be so completely out of reach for children for this to be necessary. Whilst many parents were understandably relieved to send their children back to school early in the spring, homework will continue to have an important role to play post-Covid – helping to close gaps in learning, offering opportunities for review and consolidation and for frequent checks of understanding.
Done well it will support further academic progress.