Homework not good enough?

[AnotherNameChanges]

When I was at school, if I rushed my homework or did a bad job of it, I got a bad mark, and if it was a good teacher, some feedbac to help me next time.
End of.

My son (yr6), gets quite a bit of homework (regular state school not private). He gets about 30mins of maths homework each week, 30ins of English homework, and 30 mins writing (where he writes about things he's read). He always does it. Sometimes he does it well, sometimes he rushes, but he always does it. (And he's a competitive athlete in so with training each night and competitions all weekend, it's not always easy to fit it in, but he does).

A couple of weeks ago his teacher made him stay in at lunch to re-do his writing work as 'it wasn't good enough'. So the next time he had this homework I sat with him and helped him. I tried my best. I've got a PhD so I can write. But, he was told again it wasn't good enough and this time he was asked to re-do it at home, as well as all this week's homework, and re-submit.

He was a bit upset because he's honestly trying. This week I helped him again with the re-subkitted work and the new homework that's been set. I'm don't doing it for him, just trying to help him where I am guessing he's gone wrong (largely not writing enough. Not putting capital letters, full stops etc... I think...), But, I can't see what he's doing majorly wrong and have asked the teacher 'if its not good enough again can you please explain what he needs to do'.

AIBU to think making a child re-do their homework is a bit mean. Why not just give them a poor mark and some feedback to help them improve for next time? He's only just turned 11 and has enough homework to do IMO without having to re-do what he's already done.

Is it possible that she saw the work that you helped with and made him redo it because it looked like he didn't do it on his own ?

Playing devil's advocate here but could the feedback have been verbal? My kids would have been gutted to hear that they had to redo the work and might not have processed much of what the teacher said afterwards. I think an email to clarify what feedback was given last time and what he can do next time to improve his work would be helpful

By year 6 if he’s still missing capital letters and fulls stops routinely in his work he’s a long way off where he needs to be! Get in touch with the teacher and find out what each piece of homework is driving at - is he meant to be practicing the passive voice? Is he concentrating on sentence starters, or subordinating conjunctions? How is his spelling and handwriting (it needs to be neat and joined correctly, with correct spellings). These are all things my own DD in year 6 has been doing recently, so it’s probably worth a chat with the teacher…..

Year 6 is already high school in continental Europe. The amount of work he has to do weekly is really tiny tiny compared to many other countries where the rule is usually the school year x 10 min per day (not week), so by year 6, it would be expected to do 60 min per day. There is also an expectation of quality and if a y6 still writes with a style, punctuation, structure, syntax, grammar of a lesser year, yes, actual to redo it to a higher standard is acceptable
In an ideal world, teachers would sit and go into lengthy details about what is lacking in work, in reality, they don't have the time ... unless a child asks, what could I do better. Then the teacher replies.

I would be more worried about the previous years teacher who accepted 2 lines of wok for homework rather than expecting it to be done properly.