Homework - do you enforce it? If not, why not?

[NC28]

Seen a recent thread RE homework in early school years, with lots of posters saying they don’t enforce it, so their child doesn’t do it.

My DC isn’t at school yet, so no experience of this. I appreciate in the latter school years there would be obvious consequences for not doing homework, but what about in the younger years?

Are there any consequences for the child if homework isn’t done, or is it seen as a parental choice, in your experience?

I enforce it but don't get too worked up about it. I think the school should be encouraging responsibility from the child though, if they don't do it they lose a little privilege. Pushing all that responsibility back to the parent is unfair I think, parents already have enough to do regarding care of their kids. It's also doing a disservice to the kids. The ones who have neglectful parents most of the time now are falling behind at school too.

In DS1s class they had to write down their homework every morning. Every single day someone, the same 4 or 5 Mums would ask for the days homework in the parents what's app group and a photo would go around. Then they'd have a discussion about whether they should be doing part A and B or just C etc. Those kids learned to never write down their homework or pay attention because Mum will be sorting it out later anyway. It totally undermined the whole point of the children learning responsibility. I think the school should have inspected their homework journals and used that as a gauge of who was listening rather than the homework itself. But they were very hands off. Those kids are probably struggling the most now in secondary.

No, it caused too much fighting in our house and just wasn’t worth the misery. My daughter is now in vocational training as a teen

Depends on the child and if they can do it on their own. I refuse to do it - happy to answer questions they have about it and facilitate it but I won't do it.

Most of my children would happily do it and that's fine but I have had one child who was not ready for formal schooling until about ten and for whom it was a major trauma and ruined our weekends - homework another would have polished off in 30 minutes would take hours and exhausting hours of crying and stress.

So I went into school and told them to please stop sending it as it was counter productive, it wasn't going to be done, I'd take the responsibility and that there was no evidence that homework in primary school improves learning. I still don't believe in it until they start GCSEs apart from reading books. I don't think teachers should have to set or mark it either - waste of their precious time. Or more likely - their time at home.

And before anyone jumps on me and tries to say I am ruining their education or don't know what I am saying - I am a senior University professor and all of my children (including the homework-averse) are at or have graduated from University or conservatoires.

I dont believe in the 'every day counts' mantra either - that was a misuse of Durham University research which said 'every day counts' once your attendance drops below around 85% (can't recall the precise attendance off the top of my head but basically if you already had poor attendance every additional day of absence matters). COVID lockdown showed the every day counts to be false when it was the schools doing the closing and it caused serious socialisation and mental health problems.

Primary, yes. Secondary, I'm available to help but I think it's important for kids to build an independent work ethic.

My secondary aged child - yes. Does all his homework. Gets maybe 90 mins a week so not too bad.

Primary- both do reading at least 3x a week, play on the maths apps a couple of times a week. Junior aged child doesn't get homework as in sheets or things, but like a project type thing each half term. They're given about 8 choices and are supposed to choose 5 to do. If my child wants to do them, we do them, but I don't push it. He's spent all day at school, he has football and cadets in the evenings...he's entitled to some downtime.

Did anyone who chose not to enforce it (or partially enforced it) ever feel the wrath of any teacher? Or are they quite lax about it all?

I didn't enforce homework. I dont think there is any evidence that it is helpful for the majority of children, and its an added stress that I wasnt prepared to take on without believing in the benefits

I would guess most of them would be relieved not to have to set or mark it but it needs the Head to enforce the policy. I would imagine many of them get fed up having to mark the parents work every week.

At my grandchildren's school it's voluntary.

We didn’t enforce the reading log or the official school book because dd read independently and vociferously well beyond her class level in the early years. I just pre-filled out the log and dd would happily show her teacher what she was actually reading. They didn’t seem to mind. Dd has hyperlexia so the regular curriculum didn’t work for her in that regards.

spelling words we would just quiz her at the beginning of the week and if she knew them all we wouldn’t go over them again. If she missed some we would just occasionally shout those out and have her practice them orally. Spelling doesn’t really take much time to learn at that age.

we did do other homework. I think it’s good to instill study habits. Even if I don’t love the idea of sitting down and doing homework for young children, I think if the school sends it home, it sends the wrong message not to do it. It was always just a simple math worksheet. Never anything that took more than a few minutes. We set up a little desk for her in the kitchen so she could work while we made dinner.

Our primary school rarely ever seems to give any homework...

DS is in Y6 and usually just has a maths quiz to complete over the weekend on an app, as well as an assumption that they're reading (I presume). I know it's not enforced because we recently had a parents info thing and the teacher was encouraging the children to do the maths, because there are a handful who don't. I was shocked tbh that some dont do it. I might feel differently if it was every day but I think that's pretty poor and doesn't bode well for secondary school.

I think it should be a bit more focused on the child. One of my children is an excellent speller. There’s a long list of weekly activities to be done with that weeks spelling list, my deal is if they can be spelt correctly on a spelling test done by me I’m not going to take ages going over every word in hangman. Better off doing extra maths which is harder work for her.

No I didn't enforce it. My son has additional needs, and was more in need of fresh air and exercise after school.
He did minimal homework in primary and early secondary.
He went to homework clubs at secondary and did most of it there.
We found other ways to practice reading and writing in primary. We did holiday diaries until he was 14.
He has a great work ethic and is in his second year at university

Depends on the age of the child surely? At high school they will start getting detentions for missed homework.

I think that's pretty poor and doesn't bode well for secondary school

Not in my experience @Wonderwall23 (unless we want to compete with Korea) young children need to be doing other things not more sitting at a desk and doing homework when they are at home. There is little correlation between learning and hours spent supposedly doing schoolwork.

There was a study done by NASA that essentially showed that we teach children to be stupid and grind all the intelligence and creativity out of them by our idea of what school should be and should teach them.

Have you ever watched the famous TED talk by Sir Ken Robinson? Can highly recommend it! And it's very funny.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY

The homeworks at primary level when our children went to school were incredibly dull and basic.

They did them but I'm incredulous that the school had the audacity to set them. We used other resources to consolidate whatever was on the curriculum at the time. That was worth doing.

We do it, but I never had to force them. I just taught them that learning was fun. If they felt ill or really didn't want to do it then they didn't have to, but that was probably only once or twice a year. I think making it feel like their choice was the key. They happily do maths /reading /learning new things just for fun as well. They are popular and outgoing children but aren't at all ashamed to enjoy learning. DH and I always role modelled a love of learning, of reading etc and I think that helped

We found homework useful as a tool to see what DD actually did in school and especially from Y3 onwards, where the gaps were the school didn't tell us about.

In Infant schoo she was doing daily reading and had one weekend thing, often quite fun and never longer than 1/2 hour.

In Junior they got homework (reading, spelling, maths or English) on Thursdays to be handed in on Tuesdays. It wasn't enforced but recommended. As I said, we found out that DD lacked in some areas and the homework was a good tool to see what was going on.

She also learnt to have a routine and when she moved to Y7 there wasn't any issues with mandatory homework for each subject. She just got on with it.

I was more annoyed with the holiday projects, no way these were designed for a child to do on her own.

We chose our children’s schools (got our choice) so trust the staff and do at least what they ask.

Why send your children to a school and then decide not to follow their lead?