The child trudges into the classroom amongst the crowd, all filing in and quickly taking their books out, ready for the upcoming scrutiny. Dreading the next five minutes, he conforms, desperately trying to think of some heist or gimmick that will give him a more credible answer to that question ‘and where is your homework?’ rather than ‘my cat ate it’. He thinks back to the previous night, to that colossal mountain of books in his bedroom, strangling any possibility of relaxation. With all hope gone, he himself to his fate, knowing that he will have to be up at 10 working after he is punished.

A situation that most can relate to. However I wanted to find out whether homework was viewed at my school as a necessary evil, or as something that should be banned outright.

It’s clear that homework, unfortunately, has its purposes, allowing teachers to monitor a student’s progress and helping to consolidate what a student has learnt. Year 12 student Henry De Oliveira told me ‘I hated doing homework for GCSE, but now I’ve gone through the GCSE process, I’ve realised that homework is important to reinforce things that have been learnt and I think it is most helpful when it involves some form of revision which allows you to realise what you do and do not know.’ It seems that homework is like a going to the doctor: it seems like it’s a waste of precious time when you’re doing it, but eventually you grudgingly realise its benefits.

Another year 12 pupil, Alwaleed Aldoory, recognises its benefits, but says that often it’s over prescribed, telling me that ‘I believe homework is good, but it should not be over prescribed as then students will not have enough time to decompress or spend time with family/hobbies’. However, it seems like adults, liberated from the grip of homework, have the opposite view,  with local mother Susanna Payne telling ‘my son is up till 10 doing homework, and thinking back I think that most of the things that he’s learning aren’t useful in adult life’, before adding that ‘I can’t even understand some of the homework he brings home; I don’t remember getting anywhere near his amount of homework’. It does indeed seem fair to say that children don’t need to learn about Julius Caesar’s conquests or differential topology unless they want to be professors.

 More importantly, homework contributes to our culture where we focus on ‘good’ subjects such as maths, to the detriment of the arts, and the levels of homework that each child gets means they cannot focus on their other interests. But the most important thing is that the world is becoming ever more competitive, and we’re starting to reinforce the values of working till you drop too early on in children. They need time to have fun, and discover interesting things that are not school related. Take the two extremes on the homework scale: Finland and South Korea. South Korean children begin getting homework from the age of 7 and often spend their evenings in after school classes called ‘hagwons’, and even though this has won them an impressive university enrolment rate of 70%, this has also had the side effect of contributing to the highest suicide rate in the developed world. In Finland, children start receiving homework at 11 and are in one of the most relaxed school systems in the world, and it still manages to have a university enrolment rate of 63%. 

Teachers seem equally concerned about this, and seem to be trying to tweak the system. Mrs A McLusky told me that ‘homework should have a definite purpose. It can be used to extend or consolidate learning or simply as a means to create or develop research skills. Although I am not always successful, I try to only issue homework when I think it is necessary rather than issuing it for the sake of it.’ However, from my personal experience this appears to be a minority, and it seems like every day one is given a useless piece of homework just for the sake of it.

Despite the fact that I happen to go to an unusually pro homework school, it nonetheless seems that children are getting too much homework for very little purpose. It obviously has its uses, but it needs to be given less and be much more focused on clear objectives, and although the situation is improving, there is still a long way to go.

By Alfie Watkins