To not bother with weekly ‘busy work’ homework tasks?

[MissYouForever]

My daughter is in year 1. She has weekly spellings with a weekly test and of course her school reading book. Both of these I fully understand the importance of and we do always make sure these are all completed.

But we are also being set weekly tasks for English and Maths that I really, really do not have the time to organise and motivate my child to do. It is clearly to support their learning in whatever they are are being taught this week, but in all honesty it just feels like a box ticking exercise from the school/teacher.

AIBU to just not bother? She is 5! She is doing great at school, no problems at all. I know it will be brought up to me in the the parents evening and I hate that feeling that I’m letting my child down or not being a good enough parent to force these silly tasks to be completed every week. It’s just too much. I have a younger child, trying to manage work, the household and maintain my own sanity.

I just feel like it’s yet another expectation on the parents. Another thing we are scrutinised with and made to feel inadequate about. And I just find it irritating seeing an end of year report for my child with top ticks on all the ‘exceeding expectations’ criteria for academic progress and behaviour except a big red X on the homework heading because we didn’t do enough of the tasks (this was last year)

Children spend 30 hours+ at school per week. That should be plenty of time to cover what is needed at primary school.

School facilities and funding is now so poor that the curriculum barely includes many subjects/ little enrichment. Therefore, to receive a balanced education state school pupils need numerous extra-curricular activities such as properly taught sports, art, music, drama, coding depending on their interests.

They also need downtime, time to be imaginative and play in an unstructured environment (particularly as they start school far too young in the UK: 4 and 5 year olds shouldn’t even be at school let alone doing homework), see friends and family, go on trips to museums/ parks/ beaches/ different cities etc.

School sucks up most of their time and energy as it is and research shows that at primary school homework has no beneficial effect whatsoever on children’s outcomes later in education. It is the very definition of pointless “busy work”.

I totally agree with you. Finding out from the school what they've been learning all week is like trying to get blood out of a stone. Homework is a really good way in for parents to engage with them.

We get times tables and spelling, and reading. We focus on the reading as they both know their tables and the spellings. There is also a sheet of 'family homework' which we ignore as a) we are comfortable doing enrichment without instruction from the school and b) I don't want to be set homework by the school.

We used to obediently do the sheets that were set but they were stupidly easy and never acknowledged so we were glad when the school stopped.

This frees us up for 11+ homework which as well as the content itself has taught DS1 resilience in approaching tricky work.

@PlanetMa state school pupils need numerous extra-curricular activities

I don't think this is true at all - makes it sound you are running the house like Captain Von Trapp

Extra-curricular activites are a nice to have, not doing them won't make your child a feckless loser. Engaged and involved parents are much more important than ensuring your child goes to swimming, martial arts, dance, piano and spanish class out side of school.

Too many activities are not a bonus to kids, though. Ive seen some run ragged, and they aren’t growing up more motivated, imo.

I understand the arguments around homework being a battle, and it being upsetting and demoralising for young children.

But what I would say is this. If you have a child who is going to be good at homework, they'll probably be fine doing it from Y1 and hopefully there won't be any issues as they get older and homework becomes more important.

If you have a child who finds homework a struggle from the start, this is not necessarily going to change. I have had endless battles with my DC over homework so I know the pain. But giving up is a cop-out imo - there will be so many things they're not interested in, they don't want to do or that they find difficult as they get older, and I do think it's part of our job as parents to teach our kids coping skills for when their brains are looking at the page and literally shutting down or rebelling because there are just too many mental obstacles in the way of getting started.

They do in order to have a balanced education. The primary curriculum now spends an inordinate amount of time on English and maths, presumably because a significant minority of children struggle with the basics and the classes are much too large so the pace of learning is slower. The lack of sufficient SEND provision and variety of schools for different children with different abilities, talents, interests and learning styles/ needs means that all children suffer due to this one-size fits all approach which holds everyone back and makes it a miserable experience for many children in different ways.

Those who are academically able get very bored. Meanwhile other areas of learning have continuously been squeezed and cut and few primaries have specialists come in anymore to teach music, sports, IT etc on a regular basis. Teachers do their best to fill the gaps but with the lack of funding and facilities and the restrictions of the curriculum it is inadequate as a rounded education. Compare it to the level of sports/ music/ drama/ public speaking tuition in private schools, or the quality and frequency of cultural/ educational trips, and the difference is immense. This is what provides cultural capital, broad learning that doesn’t stifle a love of learning in many children, and also crucially build confidence in children because they can find and pursue interests and talents (aside from the difference in the pace of learning in more appropriate class sizes).

I certainly do not force my children to do any extra curricular activities if that’s what you’re trying to imply: everything they do they have asked to do and continue to do out of choice. If they try something and don’t enjoy it they stop it. However, they also need downtime and time for free play and unstructured time together/ with friends/ alone, time for imaginative play/ relaxing, time in the garden or at parks/ beaches as I specifically stated. You have quoted half a sentence of my post out of context deliberately in an attempt to misrepresent it when one of the key points I made was that the school week (taking up so much time with such narrow and slow learning) takes up too much of their time already and they need to be allowed to play and be children and learn to follow their own interests.

The academic learning covered at school could easily be done in 3-4 days per week meaning either there was more time to incorporate a broader curriculum including options for quality tuition into the school day in activities that currently can rarely be accessed at a meaningful level in state schools, or that children had a shorter school week and a better balance with time at home to have sufficient free time and to pursue extracurricular things of their choosing. What they certainly do not need at primary level is to have pointless homework set in top of their work at school, usually very boring and covering again the same dryly taught content.

Extensive research on this matter has been performed and unequivocally shows that homework at primary school levels has no beneficial impact on educational attainment at all. Several teachers on the thread have also noted this.

Ultimately state schools seem to have morphed into something more akin to a social service combined with childcare and the ways they are structured and run, treating children as an amorphous blob of little clones, is not based on the data on child development, rather minimising costs. That is a false economy indeed. Education should be the number one funding priority for our country given the dire situation at present, if we want any hope of economic growth in the future. Based on recent polls voters don’t consider it to be in their top ten priorities to be addressed which is shocking.

There's a balance there. Apparently 4/5 of DS' year 5 class can't swim. The group that can are all the middle class kids

Agree that you can over-schedule kids though.

@Legomania absolutlety I'm not anti activity at all - but to say you can't be a well rounded person without them is just nonsense.

My children have swimming lessons and we tried martial arts but they weren't into it so we stopped. If swimming lessons were not available in our area we would teach them ourselves - which is why I believe it is engaged and involved parents that make the biggest difference not the classes.

An activity every single night is madness

So many of the pro-homework arguments seem to rely on the idea that 5 year old brains are the same as adult brains. I just can't bring myself to believe that making a child that age sit down and do busy work at the end of an already long day is creating any positive habits that you can't instil with household routine.

Decompression time to play, create, go swimming, lie on the floor and stare at the ceiling, whatever. Then everyone gets bags etc. ready for the morning, family dinner with conversation, bath, reading, bed is so much more beneficial, imo.

@PlanetMa maybe your kids just go to a rubbish school because I haven't had that experience at all.

Glad your kids love all their activities that you are desperate to defend though.

Who suggested that they should do an activity every single night?

And I didn’t say they needed extra-curricular activities to be a well-rounded person, but to fill the gaps in school education in order to have a well rounded education. Presumably you understand that there is more to a person than their education and therefore the two are not equivalent?

Please stop deliberately misrepresenting my comments.

I am pro homework, but it’s your choice, up to you. She’s thriving at school now which is great, but it wouldn’t harm to get her into the habit of doing her homework now, so in a couple of years she’s used to it. She may need the support and extra work more when she gets to key stage 2.

I also feel like, you decide what you want to do, but don’t complain about the ‘consequences.’ Ie if you choose not to do homework, accept it is to be mentioned at parents evening. If you don’t do homework, don’t be mad about the red cross on her school report. They aren’t going to tick it if she’s not done it, so accept the red cross is coming.

Why are you being so unpleasant? You could have disagreed with my comment (which was a general comment on the thread, not mentioning you or directed at you, and not about my children’s particular school) and provided reasons to at you disagree (based on what I’d actually said rather than things you’d fabricated) without turning it into some kind of personal attack and making assumptions about me and my family and my children’s school.

It seems very weird and defensive to react in such a rude and unpleasant manner to a stranger on the internet simply because they have a different view to you on whether homework should be set in primary schools.

Exactly. In fact even 30 years ago a significant minority of primary schools had their own swimming pools onsite. Now that’s very rare due to cost cuts: most have been filled in with concrete. Many schools have even sold off their playing fields so children cannot engage in lots of sporting activities because there isn’t sufficient space to do so. It’s really sad. All of these issues are down to state education being so inadequately funded.

@PlanetMa "state school pupils need numerous extra-curricular activities such as properly taught sports, art, music, drama, coding"

You literally listed 5 different activities - so no not every night I apologise, at least they get the weekend off.

Filling the gaps in their school education is literally the job of parenting - if you have to ship it out to paid activities then that's your parenting choice - but to say those activities are a "need" - to be clear that is the word you used - is just incorrect. Involved parents are the key not what classes your children do.

Additionally I do believe a well rounded education contributes to being a well rounded person, I don't think it is the only factor, but to pretend it isn't a factor is strange.

@PlanetMa Stating that something is a "need" when it is not, and is out of the reach of many families is unpleasant.

No child "needs" karate or tap or drama class - if you can great - but to suggest people who aren't doing these things aren't meeting their children's needs is cruel, judgemental and - unpleasant.

If you want people to be pleasant start with yourself.

So the school is whining that people aren't doing homework (doubt your the only one), while structurally making it extra difficult and time-consuming 🤔

Fwiw I went to school elsewhere in Europe, homework isn't regular until you go to secondary school (age 12), and before that there is some irregular homework (studying for tests only, once month or so) from age 9 (last 3 years of primary).

It certainly isn’t me that’s been unpleasant.

I stated it is needed “to receive a rounded education”. This was clearly a judgement on the underfunded and badly structured state education system, not on parents who can’t afford to fill the gaps outside school. It is the schools that are failing to meet their remit of providing an adequate education to children, as my posts made perfectly clear. I did not criticise parents at any point.

As I suspected, you appear to have invented personal offence due to a general comment which was not directed at you or reference you in any way and then decided that because you clearly have some insecurity about what you are providing for your own children - even though my comment was about the inadequacy of the education in schools and that these things should be provided for all children in schools precisely so that they are not the preserve only of those children whose parents can pay for them and children get a sufficient balance between learning time and downtime at home - you have decided this gives you a licence to be rude and spiteful to me and make personal comments about my family and my children’s school.

For context, I’m the lone parent of two children with additional needs, so I don’t need your lectures implying that I am in a privileged position.

I can see the opinion is split on this but I'm with the OP. In my experience the expectation does get too much, and sometimes borders on silly (model of a castle with a working drawbridge/moat in year 1 😩) KS1 homework other than reading/spellings is excessive imo.

I know some mums who have been passing on their old homework projects to other kids at the school. Brilliant idea if you ask me.

Did it occur to you that I might have more than one child, and that not all of them might do all of the activities listed? Did it occur to you that these are examples and that - as my posts specifically stated more than once - I wasn’t implying that all children should do all of these activities outside school, rather that it is important for children with specific interests in areas barely covered in the current state school curriculum to have access to the ones that particularly interest that particular child so that children can try different things and can identify and pursue their own specific skills and talents.

I made it clear that my point was that schools should be facilitating this so that they cater for the fact that children are different and have different skills and interests and, therefore, foster a love of learning rather than trying to impose a very narrow and boring curriculum which means many children are turned off learning entirely and miss out on many things which they might excel at and never discover their talents unless parents can fund things privately, which they should not have to be doing.

You seem to have some significant issued with reading comprehension and have entirely missed the point, instead fabricating things nobody has said and taking random personal offence at comments which were quite explicitly about the failings of the school system, not failings of parents.

Additionally I do believe a well rounded education contributes to being a well rounded person, I don't think it is the only factor, but to pretend it isn't a factor is strange.

And again misrepresenting comments made. I stated that being able to access decent quality tuition in various subjects outside English and maths is important for a well-rounded education.

You then tried to claim I had stated anybody who doesn’t have a varied education cannot become a well-rounded person, which I had not stated.

At no point did I “pretend it isn’t a factor” in becoming a well-rounded person, hence why I’ve been arguing this aspect of education is crucial and should be provided in schools so that all children can access it, because it is a factor in people becoming a well-rounded person, as well as in developing a love of learning and enabling all children to find and pursue their specific interests and skills.

You were the person who took offence to me stating the importance of this, yet in this latest post have admitted that it is indeed a factor and then tried to claim that I said the opposite.

Disingenuous, bizarre and self-contradictory. Based on these posts you seem like the kind of person who could start an argument in an empty room.

@PlanetMa I disagree on that too it is not the schools place to be fitting in 500 extra-curriculars.

A well rounded education involves learning at school and at home - and that does not have to include paid for activities - but it can.

A huge part of parenting is teaching. Schools aren't there to fill in parenting gaps.

Weird you felt the need to bring up my kids - if this is as you say " a general discussion" they do activities though if it makes you feel better - I just don't see them as an essential - it's a nice to have.

@ PlanetMa "state school pupils need numerous extra-curricular activities such as properly taught sports, art, music, drama, coding"

Again, another quote of half a sentence. Conveniently you missed out the last four words of it:

”…depending on their interests.”