Why has primary homework become a race to the bottom?

[tokyogirl]

I've noticed this over a couple of years now.... to be seen to be doing any kind of homework in primary school is a literal race to the bottom.

"Oh we don't do that"
"I never fill in the reading chart"
"We don't bother"
"Can't be bothered to do all those spellings"

In DC school completed reading charts and such like are rewarded yearly with certificate and prizes, why wouldn't you want your child to be rewarded and have a confidence boost?

Any hint of actually doing homework seems to be met with an eye roll or smirk?!

As above, the evidence shows that homework at primary level makes no difference to attainment.

On the other hand, making children do homework takes time away from things that are good for children such as spending time with parents, siblings, friends, playing, relaxing and doing things they enjoy.

Finland only gives minimal homework even at Secondary level, and has much shorter school weeks. And they have amongst the best/ the best educational results in the world.

There is a different way, and better way, than just more and more school work and pressure.

YABU, the parents not doing homework are not disadvantaging them academically and are advantaging them by freeing up that time to do other stuff that is good for them.

I'm all for homework that has an actual benefit, but generally primary homework doesn't.

[quote ShastaBeast]@ZolaGrey do you have links to any research? I never had homework in primary so don’t think it’s detrimental not to do it.

Our school seems to think parents should be teaching some aspects of the curriculum. DH’s private primary never expected it.[/quote]
Whack it into google scholar, I'm doing a PhD based on primary arts teaching and read a few journals about primary homework last year, there's quite a few kicking about.

There was a contingent of passionate anti-homework parents at DC's primary school, which did assign homework. I used to think...there are so many other (good) primaries that don't require homework in our area...if you feel so strongly, why not just send your children there instead?!

Personally I think homework in primary school helps children prepare for secondary. Have noticed a few of DC's friends who had little or no homework in primary are struggling at the start of secondary...though surely the gaps will close soon enough.

Agree with PPs that primary homework that requires too much parental involvement can be ridiculous not to mention unfair to families that don't have the time / resources. Used to hate being expected to print things at home. And some of the research assignments on the Internet used to make me bristle...as I didn't want DC fumbling around and cutting and pasting nonsense. But since Covid and secondary, I guess I'm happy we have a printer now and that we're all used to having so many apps and web sites to log into, etc. The primary experience made it easier to adapt to lockdown and life in secondary.

We don't bother with some things because they're easy and time is better spent doing other things: for example, DD (Yr 5) could spell all (over 100) of the spellings they aim to be able to do by the end of year 6 in year 3 (tested at school so they do know this but she still gets them sent home). So we really don't need to practise the spellings. We give it a quick look on the morning of her test. She reads daily and fills in the diary herself and I sign it once a week.

Homework-wise, I think her school gets it right. It's based on the topic they're learning about at school and there are three columns - Science, Maths and English - each with 6 or so choices of homework. There's a great variety and children can choose which to do, as long as they do at least one from each of the columns per half term. It makes them feel like they have control over their learning and they learn about their topic via the method they most enjoy.

Homework-wise, I think her school gets it right. It's based on the topic they're learning about at school and there are three columns - Science, Maths and English - each with 6 or so choices of homework. There's a great variety and children can choose which to do, as long as they do at least one from each of the columns per half term. It makes them feel like they have control over their learning and they learn about their topic via the method they most enjoy

This is very similar to ours except they also have an ‘expressive arts’ column, my DC love doing it!

I do it for setting the routine more than anything else (and hearing her read is great to consolidate some of DD2's speech issues) but ours is mostly self-policing online stuff - the spellings are all set and homework done online, the odd bit of homework is on Google Classroom and we don't have to write a comment in the reading diaries - we just tick and sign they've read and then they fill in the page numbers themselves.

At our school - it’s almost like a competition on who finished it first. 😂 - we don’t compete btw, we finish it but at her own pace. As long as she understands it - I’m cool. No one is going to put ‘did all my homework’ on their cv and bag a million pound a year job 😂

Our primary has massively scaled back on homework preferring to encourage lots of reading -

My son is not school age yet but I am such a goody two shoes I would find I really hard to not enforce homework.

However I do disagree with it for primary age children. I don't bring my work home with me because I need the downtime of home life (introvert) to recharge so why should he.

Of course life should be about learning anyway - reading books, playing a sport after school, trips to an Aquarium at the weekend etc. I hate the thought of him sitting down at the dining table feeling stressed or bored trying to do a piece of homework which in the long term I can't see what benefit it would have.

DS1 has an assortment of SENs.
It's not that we don't try but he is naturally resistant, finds it tough and I object in principle to something that fundamentally relies on my input (rather than just supervising) although I will transcribe if he's tired.

Normally we have a range of extra curriculars that are of clear long term benefit to a dyspraxic, autistic child so time and energy can be limited anyway.

While their classmates and parents carried in beautiful models of castles, my DSs brought in labelled print outs of the castles that they built themselves in Minecraft

We do a lot of informal general life learning. School can't cover everything, but there are limits of how much school we can cope with in the home. We do prioritise reading though, in a multitude of forms.

So, not a fan of formal homework, but I do take my role on supporting learning for life seriously.

@SoUtterlyGroundDown

Homework-wise, I think her school gets it right. It's based on the topic they're learning about at school and there are three columns - Science, Maths and English - each with 6 or so choices of homework. There's a great variety and children can choose which to do, as long as they do at least one from each of the columns per half term. It makes them feel like they have control over their learning and they learn about their topic via the method they most enjoy

This is very similar to ours except they also have an ‘expressive arts’ column, my DC love doing it!

Oh yes, they manage to get plenty of posters, models and collages etc into the options

SN Year 10 child here but he has not been given hw since they have gone back. It will pay his GCSE grades no doubt. He has a tutor at home 3 hours a week to help him keep on top of his work at school. He needs continued revision to keep his learning fresh in his mind. I have bought text books he uses at school for tutor to use with him. If he keeps up and gets a few GCSES and BTEC it will be worth it.

I never had homework at primary and neither did my children, thank goodness. Thanks to Google, I found it seems to have been thought it would be 'a good thing' in 1998, and so introduced in many primary schools. I was still teaching then, but our head didn't make it compulsory. Sometimes my pupils would ask for homework, because they were bored at home and wanted to be like their secondary-aged siblings.
My grandchildren did have it though, and I dreaded the phone call....."Mum, could you have H...y on Saturday? He'll be OK as he's got his project to do, and I know you got lots of books on Greeks, Romans, animals, insects etc., etc."

I personally don’t want to spend all weekend doing homework - we do the English and Maths but not the free choice sheet and not as much reading as school would like with the child that hates to read . We did more when they were tiny . We’re in a Grammar area so from year 5 there’s tutor homework too. I think there’s as much value in a trip to a museum or a swim at the weekend as in making some kind of colossal structure relevant to the term topic- that’s more made by parent than child.

Mine do reading and spellings. 7 year old is dyslexic and struggles massively, and it probably looks like we do nothing with him when in reality we read every night and do spellings. he's learnt all his spelling for today and he's tried so unbelievably hard but this won't be rewarded or recognised as when he does his test today he will struggle and the teacher will probably think we didn't bother.
i do homework to help him catch up but if I had a child who learnt things easily and was pretty much average I probably wouldn't bother, I think homework should be for when there older.

Definitely two camps at our school: those who do the homework and those who say they don’t. My dd (aged 6) loves getting spellings to learn and loves practising joined up handwriting, and also loves maths, so she really likes getting homework. Other dd hated it throughout primary and it was always a battle.. lots of tears and tantrums. In the end I told her teacher that I wasn’t going to force her to do any more homework. She did a lot of free reading and always got good marks in spellings without practising at home, but maths was the big problem.

I think the reason is that the studies on homework at that educational stage suggest that it's not helpful. So in terms of school work, it's just an evidence based position not to give work that interferes with home time and has little or no benefit.

Children at that age are in school for long enough to do all the work required for their level. When they spend after school time on homework they aren't playing, reading for fun, getting exercise, spending time with family, doing chores, or any number of things that are equally important for children as school work.

Well, I shamelessly brag that we don't do any homework. My son is at a school where the mums are quite competitive and they need to calm down and chill out a bit. I just don't see the point of it when my son is young, doing really well at school and we could be doing other interesting and educational things that he is more interested in. I think that it's about using your common sense, assessing the usefulness of it and using the time more widely to support your child's individual learning or interests rather than something more generic set for the whole class.

You only have to look at Finland to see that there really is no benefit.

My children are past primary school age, but with the older two I happily went along with making sure that homework was done, in fact I quite enjoyed things like listening to reading. DC3 was the revelation, as she is mildly dyslexic and suddenly homework became quite traumatic as she struggled to write legibly and couldn't remember spellings from one minute to the next. I did ultimately give up on trying to make her do stuff that she simply couldn't because it was turning her right off schoolwork generally, and happily her teachers mostly agreed with that approach.

What actually worked for her was getting a wonderful specialist teacher who took her writing apart and put it back together (her writing is now much nicer than her siblings'), organised lots of multi-sensory ways of learning, but most importantly built up her self-esteem and faith in herself. In Year 6 she did absolutely fine in national curriculum tests and was getting glowing reports, all on the back of minimal homework.

In my head I'm quite anti homework. In reality we're doing it, because Dd in yr1 has missed half a year of school thanks to covid and does need to learn to read! That said I already think it's quite a lot, 3 reading books a week, doodle maths every day of we can, and support through the year to count up and down to 100, times tables 2's, 5's, 10's. It's quite a step up from the couple of terms she actually spent in reception!

Also worth saying that some dc's have very long days if they're in wrap around care. Mon - Wed my Yr and preschooler are in breakfast club, school and after school club, 9hrs in total. I'm not doing homework on top, they are tired and I'll only put them off!

I think that it's about using your common sense, assessing the usefulness of it and using the time more widely to support your child's individual learning or interests rather than something more generic set for the whole class.
Yes, this.

My DS is dyslexic and it always really annoyed me that his homework would involve reading and writing tasks that might have taken most kids 10 minutes, but took us much longer and a lot more misery and stress. And as winetime says, a huge effort by him which then wasn't recognised as the standard didn't look like we'd made a big effort. They did know he was dyslexic but it didn't extend to thinking that kind of thing through. My DD is still at that school now and it's SO much better without all the pressure since they dropped the homework.

In the future I am planning on saying no to homework if I need to and telling the teacher they're not doing it. If they're too tired, I think they need to chill, if it's too much, if I don't think it's relevant, or if it's more important that they do something with the family. I am very much prepared to be 'that' parent.

I've not come across it at school but I see it a lot online. People smugly announcing that they don't do homework to protect their child's mental health. Sometimes I wish I could be that confident. My dc hate homework and I hate nagging them but if we don't do it the teachers tell us both off so we do it.