To be livid that year 11 DS thinks 4-5 hours/week homework/revision is enough for GCSEs?

[Hotdaisies22]

DS in year 11. Bright boy but has always been poor at doing homework at home despite being well set up for it at home (quiet desk space etc). Does his homework at homework club after school -Mon - Thurs max 5 hrs week (thats only time homework club room is available at his school). We're having conversations that he now needs to up his game these next few months before GCSEs and start studying /revising at home extra time. Getting massive push back and causing a lot of friction. He thinks what he does is enough and no intention of doing more "at the end of a tiring school day" (he only has a 20 min journey to school). What are other year 11s doing? (I'm trying to have conversation with his school on this but so far they've been rubbish - no reply!)

I'm doing a PhD and work less than that. You're insane.

5 hours extra a week is LOADS more than almost any state educated child I know. (I have a Y10 and a Y12)

That appears to be 5 hours including homework, not 5 hours extra.

5 hours a week of homework would probably be set for a Y8 child in my school.

He can do 5 hours a day and no homework if he wants but some of his peers will be doing far more, and those are the people he's competing with in life, for college and university places and for jobs.

I was on a Master’s course wjth someone who was used to putting in similar amounts of overwork. By Master’s level she was putting in 70 hour weeks and still having to ask for extensions. She’d never learned to study efficiently, she’d just put in vast amounts of time and kept scraping through until she reached a level she couldn’t cope at. She’d have been useless as an employee because she thought overwork could compensate for everything.

Good luck OP.

fwiw, I suspect you're at greater risk of harming yourself (mental health) than helping him, but I will be happy for you if you prove me wrong. I hope you are brave enough to update us in 10 months time. Let us know what you did in the end and how things turned out & if you are content or not with choices you made.

I imagine you sent him to private school because he couldn't succeed at the other school, not because you want to insist that he must get grades you approve of at the private school.

If the price of success is to be a workaholic it's too high.

No, not really, though parents like to think it. Very competitive courses might use them as a decider between otherwise equal candidates or indicator amongst a range of other selection processes, predicted or actual grades, personal statements. And, true, entry to some A level courses requires a 5 or 6 at GCSE, hence saying Sept Y12. However, there are many options for those that don't achieve that, or want that particular academic path.

I'd also add that mocks are a well-timed wake up call for many.

I had no homework whatsoever in Primary school. An hour a day at Senior school. I have two degrees.

A lot of schools have mocks in November and again in Feb/March time so the kid who thinks that they don't have to revise until Easter will be competing against kids who have, yes, been revising/putting in extra work since November.

All depends how efficient someone is. Someone could be covering the same amount of revision in 2.5 hours as someone else in 5 hours. In the work environment (I work somewhere with one of the most popular grad recruitment schemes) we'd take the person that gets the job done in 2.5 hours. We want the people with drive and ambition but also those who are efficient and most importantly think on their feet, find faster ways of doing things and value work life balance. In the long run people who grind everything through by sheer volume of hours have a poor work life balance and tend to be those ending up changing career after we have paid for their training or they go off on long term sick leave meaning the rest of the team picks up their work.

I did sod all homework and generally did it at break/lunch time and often copied others. I started revising during study leave and did just fine (7A 2B). I think it really depends on the ability of the child how much needs to be done. Also, in reality as long as they get the grades to do what they want to do next that's fine. Years on and nobody cares about my GCSE results.

Some children are bright enough not to need such extreme measures.

One of my DDs classmates did that in YR13 due to parental pressure and the stress of A level exams. Suicide and mental illness has doubled among teens. And yet too many think the answer is to keep pushing them harder. 😓

Not when you do them in your other lessons!

I haven't read all the replies, but will probably go against the grain.
So @PrimoPiatti you're asking your son to gradually increase his working hours, so it's not a case of just doing homework but some going over work -so to say? I don't know why everyone seems to be saying that's asking too much?

I think 15/16 year olds do need a reminder, a nudge in the right direction.

If you look at some of the 11+ threads, the 9/10 year olds are doing far more work than you're asking

Your post would probably have garnered different replies on the education board

Also, as im from an Asian background, there's a different outlook to kids and work. It isn't a case of, 'oh they'll do what they want', but definitely more of a 'you need to work hard in order to achieve the grades'.

Nothing worse than your child not achieving the grades they need/are capable of.

If he's doing all that and you don't think he'll get 9s, perhaps you need to be encouraging a non-academic route for him post 16.

Apologies @PrimoPiatti , I don't know how I've managed to tag you

Honestly its awful. Imagine how scared they must have been to do that?

When we will ever learn the important of protecting mental health?

We are lucky that our secondary school is hot on this and even through lockdowns, they ensured every child had contact with the outside world. They opened the school for key worker children but also allowed those in that needed company or to be around others.

They've also changed timetables for years 10 and 11 so for example tomorrow, my son has two lessons all day, English and Science. They start English at 930 till 1030. Half hour break, English 1130 to 1230, half hour dinner, science 1 till 2 and a 15 min break then science 215 till 3.

They do all work in class, rarely set homework and spend 2 tutor times a week talking about mental health and how to take care of it

Kids need to do their homework and revise for their class tests at this stage.

But isn't that revision? Isn't that all that the OP is asking of her son?

I am surprised that so few kids on here seem to have mocks in November. DD's school are telling the students to consider them as a way of checking what gaps in knowledge need filling and to get them to find ways of revising that work for them personally. They're certainly taken seriously. When I took O levels we spent the last few weeks before study leave focussing on past papers but I think these days all that time is needed to actually cover the curriculum in some subjects.

No one is saying that academic success causes mental health problems. And it’s not always a hard work= good results. It does happen that hard work= poor results.

The evidence is that being pushed to work extremely hard and then faced with constant disappointment and criticism from parents because your academic results were not as much of a success as they expected is what leads to mental health problems.

This isn’t about work ethic, this is about insane levels of forced work that are known to cause burnout. A real work ethic means your DC can be left to it without micromanaging, without nagging, and with you simply supporting by keeping them fed, happy and with the space and resources to revise. If you have to micromanage and force your DC, then they have no work ethic and what you’re doing doesn’t teach them how to have a work ethic. It teaches them to avoid and hate work.

So true. You’ve reminded me of a girl in my school year whose parents were doctors and nothing but medicine was considered a decent career. She was a classic over-worker, a naturally ‘straight-B’ achiever who slogged away every living hour in the library writing out her notes in colours and on index cards, we barely saw her out of lessons in 6th form. Anyway she did get her straight- As at A Level and went off to do medicine in uni (Manchester I think it was).

About ten years later I met a mutual acquaintance and it turns out that she reached F2 and then had to quit, she was living on pro-plus tablets (and who knows what else) and collapsed eventually from lack of sleep before some exam or another, her mother had to take her home for 6 months to get her back to normal.

She was never really clever enough for medicine and it caught up with her in the end. She’s now a photographer and very much happier (she married a doctor, I imagine that probably appeased her parents!)

I was left to my own devices for revision and homework and I got As and Bs. I did the homework that was set and little to no revision. Why are you getting involved? It's his responsibility not yours.

Frankly I think there is an infectious sense of delusion on this thread whereby parents whose DC aren’t working are falling over themselves to say how this is fine, they got top grades with no work in 1983 and actually, grades don’t matter anyway as Aunt May’s cousin’s budgie is a billionaire with no GCSEs.

In reality, the DC who work the hardest will be those who earn, and get, the top grades next year. Sorry folks, but 4 hours a week is not going to result in good grades at GCSE for the vast majority. In an ideal world, DC would have the self-discipline to work themselves, but often this isn’t yet present for 15 year old boys. It is therefore our role as parents to step in and implement structure- and yes, that includes a good amount of study time.

I also find the faux outrage at a parent who has paid tens of thousands for their DC to be gift from private education expecting that DC to work hard bizarre. Clearly expecting straight 9s just because you have paid isn’t acceptable if the DC is not capable of that, but asking them to keep their side of the bargain and take advantage of the benefits they’ve been given is surely common sense and normal.

5-6 hours sport a week and about 20-25 hours homework a week in term time. Nephews and nieces are the same. All were doing around 12 hours a week from year 7.