Six-year-old offered catch-up tutoring despite teacher saying she is on track

[Floriaflan]

I work full time in a pretty full on job, as does my husband. We both work long hours. My child is just turned 6 and goes to an offsted outstanding school which has quite the emphasis on academic results.

Child has 5 different types of homework per week including spellings, reading, maths etc. Each one has a different platform or portal, including submitting homework sheets via teams, and then weekly she has a spelling “test” (they say it’s an assessment, not a test, but it’s a test). Plus 3 x reading books per week.

we do as much homework with her as we can but it’s difficult as she does after school clubs and then we have about 90 mins at home which is dinner, bath, bed. So to cram in homework is often short time. She tends to do it over weekends.

we got an email today saying she had been chosen for some free school tutoring as she has been “identified as someone who could benefit from catch up”. we had parents evening about 3 weeks ago and her teacher told us to keep reading with her but she’s exactly where she expects her to be

i feel a bit blind sighted by it tbh. I am quite overwhelmed by the sheer volume of school admin including all the various homework requirements, and also quite sad that she’s falling behind. There doesn’t feel like much more we can do given work hours etc.

husband does his fair share, we are very even

has anyone been through this?

Genuinely how do you do homework with a child immediately after school when you don’t get home from work until 6pm?

Will the extra tuition help her with the homework?

School does seem to have a huge amount of homework. Do you usually submit later on a Monday so you can do it over the weekend

Spellings (and times tables) we would practice on the school run, but this was before everything was done on tech

She is in year 1 so the phonics test is coming up. Although working at expected level, she may have some gaps in her phonic knowledge, or be borderline for the test, so has been put in the intervention group. It does sound like a hot housing school. Typical for this age would be a maths activity, spellings and two books - one phonetically decodeable reading book to support phonics and one reading for pleasure book, which is designed to be read to the child and sharesd by an adult.

That sounds too much for that age - I wouldn’t be taking them up on that because she does enough already. More than enough

Good call, OP! Gymnastics sounds so much more fun and that's as it should be.

I'd trust the school you chose and let them do their job.

I wouldn't have chosen a school with that homework policy though. There is no evidence that it's needed at that stage.

All homework in primary school really does is create a gap between the children that have lots of time to spend on it and those who dont.