To not bother with weekly ‘busy work’ homework tasks?

@PlanetMa "state school pupils need numerous extra-curricular activities such as properly taught sports, art, music, drama, coding"

You literally listed 5 different activities - so no not every night I apologise, at least they get the weekend off.

Filling the gaps in their school education is literally the job of parenting - if you have to ship it out to paid activities then that's your parenting choice - but to say those activities are a "need" - to be clear that is the word you used - is just incorrect. Involved parents are the key not what classes your children do.

Additionally I do believe a well rounded education contributes to being a well rounded person, I don't think it is the only factor, but to pretend it isn't a factor is strange.

Exactly. In fact even 30 years ago a significant minority of primary schools had their own swimming pools onsite. Now that’s very rare due to cost cuts: most have been filled in with concrete. Many schools have even sold off their playing fields so children cannot engage in lots of sporting activities because there isn’t sufficient space to do so. It’s really sad. All of these issues are down to state education being so inadequately funded.

Why are you being so unpleasant? You could have disagreed with my comment (which was a general comment on the thread, not mentioning you or directed at you, and not about my children’s particular school) and provided reasons to at you disagree (based on what I’d actually said rather than things you’d fabricated) without turning it into some kind of personal attack and making assumptions about me and my family and my children’s school.

It seems very weird and defensive to react in such a rude and unpleasant manner to a stranger on the internet simply because they have a different view to you on whether homework should be set in primary schools.

I am pro homework, but it’s your choice, up to you. She’s thriving at school now which is great, but it wouldn’t harm to get her into the habit of doing her homework now, so in a couple of years she’s used to it. She may need the support and extra work more when she gets to key stage 2.

I also feel like, you decide what you want to do, but don’t complain about the ‘consequences.’ Ie if you choose not to do homework, accept it is to be mentioned at parents evening. If you don’t do homework, don’t be mad about the red cross on her school report. They aren’t going to tick it if she’s not done it, so accept the red cross is coming.

Who suggested that they should do an activity every single night?

And I didn’t say they needed extra-curricular activities to be a well-rounded person, but to fill the gaps in school education in order to have a well rounded education. Presumably you understand that there is more to a person than their education and therefore the two are not equivalent?

Please stop deliberately misrepresenting my comments.

@PlanetMa maybe your kids just go to a rubbish school because I haven't had that experience at all.

Glad your kids love all their activities that you are desperate to defend though.

So many of the pro-homework arguments seem to rely on the idea that 5 year old brains are the same as adult brains. I just can't bring myself to believe that making a child that age sit down and do busy work at the end of an already long day is creating any positive habits that you can't instil with household routine.

Decompression time to play, create, go swimming, lie on the floor and stare at the ceiling, whatever. Then everyone gets bags etc. ready for the morning, family dinner with conversation, bath, reading, bed is so much more beneficial, imo.

@Legomania absolutlety I'm not anti activity at all - but to say you can't be a well rounded person without them is just nonsense.

My children have swimming lessons and we tried martial arts but they weren't into it so we stopped. If swimming lessons were not available in our area we would teach them ourselves - which is why I believe it is engaged and involved parents that make the biggest difference not the classes.

An activity every single night is madness

There's a balance there. Apparently 4/5 of DS' year 5 class can't swim. The group that can are all the middle class kids

Agree that you can over-schedule kids though.

They do in order to have a balanced education. The primary curriculum now spends an inordinate amount of time on English and maths, presumably because a significant minority of children struggle with the basics and the classes are much too large so the pace of learning is slower. The lack of sufficient SEND provision and variety of schools for different children with different abilities, talents, interests and learning styles/ needs means that all children suffer due to this one-size fits all approach which holds everyone back and makes it a miserable experience for many children in different ways.

Those who are academically able get very bored. Meanwhile other areas of learning have continuously been squeezed and cut and few primaries have specialists come in anymore to teach music, sports, IT etc on a regular basis. Teachers do their best to fill the gaps but with the lack of funding and facilities and the restrictions of the curriculum it is inadequate as a rounded education. Compare it to the level of sports/ music/ drama/ public speaking tuition in private schools, or the quality and frequency of cultural/ educational trips, and the difference is immense. This is what provides cultural capital, broad learning that doesn’t stifle a love of learning in many children, and also crucially build confidence in children because they can find and pursue interests and talents (aside from the difference in the pace of learning in more appropriate class sizes).

I certainly do not force my children to do any extra curricular activities if that’s what you’re trying to imply: everything they do they have asked to do and continue to do out of choice. If they try something and don’t enjoy it they stop it. However, they also need downtime and time for free play and unstructured time together/ with friends/ alone, time for imaginative play/ relaxing, time in the garden or at parks/ beaches as I specifically stated. You have quoted half a sentence of my post out of context deliberately in an attempt to misrepresent it when one of the key points I made was that the school week (taking up so much time with such narrow and slow learning) takes up too much of their time already and they need to be allowed to play and be children and learn to follow their own interests.

The academic learning covered at school could easily be done in 3-4 days per week meaning either there was more time to incorporate a broader curriculum including options for quality tuition into the school day in activities that currently can rarely be accessed at a meaningful level in state schools, or that children had a shorter school week and a better balance with time at home to have sufficient free time and to pursue extracurricular things of their choosing. What they certainly do not need at primary level is to have pointless homework set in top of their work at school, usually very boring and covering again the same dryly taught content.

Extensive research on this matter has been performed and unequivocally shows that homework at primary school levels has no beneficial impact on educational attainment at all. Several teachers on the thread have also noted this.

Ultimately state schools seem to have morphed into something more akin to a social service combined with childcare and the ways they are structured and run, treating children as an amorphous blob of little clones, is not based on the data on child development, rather minimising costs. That is a false economy indeed. Education should be the number one funding priority for our country given the dire situation at present, if we want any hope of economic growth in the future. Based on recent polls voters don’t consider it to be in their top ten priorities to be addressed which is shocking.

I understand the arguments around homework being a battle, and it being upsetting and demoralising for young children.

But what I would say is this. If you have a child who is going to be good at homework, they'll probably be fine doing it from Y1 and hopefully there won't be any issues as they get older and homework becomes more important.

If you have a child who finds homework a struggle from the start, this is not necessarily going to change. I have had endless battles with my DC over homework so I know the pain. But giving up is a cop-out imo - there will be so many things they're not interested in, they don't want to do or that they find difficult as they get older, and I do think it's part of our job as parents to teach our kids coping skills for when their brains are looking at the page and literally shutting down or rebelling because there are just too many mental obstacles in the way of getting started.

Too many activities are not a bonus to kids, though. Ive seen some run ragged, and they aren’t growing up more motivated, imo.

@PlanetMa state school pupils need numerous extra-curricular activities

I don't think this is true at all - makes it sound you are running the house like Captain Von Trapp

Extra-curricular activites are a nice to have, not doing them won't make your child a feckless loser. Engaged and involved parents are much more important than ensuring your child goes to swimming, martial arts, dance, piano and spanish class out side of school.

We get times tables and spelling, and reading. We focus on the reading as they both know their tables and the spellings. There is also a sheet of 'family homework' which we ignore as a) we are comfortable doing enrichment without instruction from the school and b) I don't want to be set homework by the school.

We used to obediently do the sheets that were set but they were stupidly easy and never acknowledged so we were glad when the school stopped.

This frees us up for 11+ homework which as well as the content itself has taught DS1 resilience in approaching tricky work.

I totally agree with you. Finding out from the school what they've been learning all week is like trying to get blood out of a stone. Homework is a really good way in for parents to engage with them.

Children spend 30 hours+ at school per week. That should be plenty of time to cover what is needed at primary school.

School facilities and funding is now so poor that the curriculum barely includes many subjects/ little enrichment. Therefore, to receive a balanced education state school pupils need numerous extra-curricular activities such as properly taught sports, art, music, drama, coding depending on their interests.

They also need downtime, time to be imaginative and play in an unstructured environment (particularly as they start school far too young in the UK: 4 and 5 year olds shouldn’t even be at school let alone doing homework), see friends and family, go on trips to museums/ parks/ beaches/ different cities etc.

School sucks up most of their time and energy as it is and research shows that at primary school homework has no beneficial effect whatsoever on children’s outcomes later in education. It is the very definition of pointless “busy work”.

Don't bother.
I think it's a total myth that if you don't get 5 year olds used to doing homework, they won't be able to manage as teenagers 🙄

My children never did homework in primary (beyond reading/spelling/times tables) and guess what? They managed fine in secondary school!

See this is what is interesting. A lot of teachers saying that the actual homework in if itself is of no benefit, but we know that parental engagement with kids learning/school is the biggest factor in positive outcomes. How do the school create parental engagement? Homework encourages the parent to engage with their child and creates positive reinforcement.

If a parent who has no time for homework but engages with children in other ways with learning through the week disregards said homework then it might not affect the learning outcomes of their children.

I think it’s a bit disingenuous for so many teachers to be saying that they don’t agree with homework because it gives other parents on here the idea that it will be the same in all circumstances but really the child of a teacher is in a much better position because their parent has a higher level of education which likely means they can engage with their child it other ways without prompting from the school.

A lot of children whose parents aren’t teachers or doing a similar white collar job, will really benefit from the parental input that homework encourages.

My kids’ primary school don’t do homework. It seems to be a school policy.

Which is great. However, my eldest goes to secondary next year and having to do homework of an evening is going to be a massive adjustment for her. I sort of wish the primary school had introduced it towards the end.

Taking into account that all kids and families are different, I just don't agree with this. I think young kids really do need downtime. I think mine benefited much more with some time to run around outside, do legos, get out some art supplies than they would have from doing worksheets. The last thing I wanted was kids who were only motivated by having tasks set for them, and they did not struggle down the line.

Couldn't agree less. It's very often meaningless twaddle.

They don't need any homework whatso ever at Primary level.

The idea of training is also false. Mine were " trained " to pack book bags, be responsible for PE kit and so on. Now they are very untidy. It's all bollocks to keep people in line.

My kids are older, but when they were that age I basically refused to have them do anything other than reading, spelling and times tables. It's so much more valuable to them to have a conversation over dinner, a relaxed evening and be read to than to complete rote tasks that have been shown to have no educational benefit.

They've all gone on to be responsible citizens who got great university places.

Going forward, your child once in the latter half of Junior/Primary/Middle school all the way up to the end of secondary school, homework won't be optional. So many parents don't enforce homework, and they set their child up to struggle further down the line, when the school WILL enforce it and they have to do homework. Your child, the further she goes through school will have increased homework too. Start how you mean to go on...a routine - drink, snack, homework. No 'downtime' until homework is completed. It's what I have done since my son started Reception and he's now Year 10. He might have a grumble now and then, but he gets on with his homework and now he's older is able to time manage the various subjects on different days. Yes, you can fit the homework into the day, you have to prioritise, like millions of other parents do across the country. By not enforcing it, you are giving your daughter an option, and she'll struggle further down the line, when there's no option.

"These silly tasks" are the foundation of her learning to manage and complete work (semi) independently. They should come with guidance as to time required, and in Year 1 I wouldn't expect that to be more than one hour, if as much as that. Don't teach her that they're not important.

I use our homework like an activity book - if they say they are bored at the weekend or in the evenings - bam homework time!

DS is in reception and he has a flexible homework book, a big list of about 20 activities that can be completed by the end of term - some of them are key tasks that must be done.