What if... schools stopped setting homework?
Part of the TES 'What If' series
Podcast is AI generated, and will make mistakes. Interactive transcript available in the podcast post.
What is the point of homework?
This was my first thought after reading my goddaughter’s homework assignment.
She is currently in primary school and had been set a project over the half-term that required her parents to understand the instructions, find wooden sticks, schedule time to create a structure with their daughter and then spend more time explaining what they did, and why, so she could repeat it during show and tell.
This, by the way, was a maths project.
Homework: is it worth it?
I was lost as to what this was trying to achieve and it made me think about homework in general: what is any of it designed to achieve? And if we got rid of it, what would happen? Who would benefit? And, let’s be honest, would anyone really miss it?
It is worth rehearsing what it actually takes for a piece of homework to be sent home with a child.
First, a member of staff has to write a homework policy. Not just for English and maths, but for every subject.
One of the first decisions is how much time to assign to each subject’s homework. If children in key stage 3 study 14 subjects, and each subject sets a weekly homework task lasting 30 minutes, that amounts to an additional seven hours of work outside school hours. Seven hours, minimum.
Staff workload
Once the details of the homework policy are finalised, agreed among staff and communicated to parents and students, there is the work of creating the homework itself, the answers, the timetable and the deadlines for each class. This is across five year groups.
Once homework is rolled out, it becomes an additional burden for teachers: remembering which day homework is set for each of five to 20 classes, depending on the subject; what the homework is; finding classroom time to cajole students into writing it down in planners; and then chasing completion before the deadline.
All of this while remembering who was absent when it was set and preparing the next piece of homework.
Resource management
Teachers give reminders at the start and end of lessons. There are homework clubs to support students who need them, which require staffing after school or during breaks. There are text reminders and emails home. Then there are consequences to issue for those who did not hand in their homework, and marking to be done for those who did.
This is all to say that the workload burden of homework, both implementation and oversight, is immense.
And I have not even outlined what it takes for teachers to track down students who have not completed their homework, insisting they do so after the deadline alongside this week’s task, often simply to avoid triggering a behaviour policy that might see the teacher sitting in detention alongside the child.
Homework not completed
We do all of this because the system always has. But when you pause to think about it, it is overwhelming and clearly contributes to workload pressures. And, despite our hopes, not all of these issues are resolved by online homework platforms, which can introduce new complexities of their own.
Despite all this effort, there remains a sizeable minority of children who do not complete one or more subjects’ homework each week. The reasons range from a lack of support or facilities at home to absenteeism, through to outright defiance.
So why do we put ourselves through this? Surely there must be research to show that all this effort delivers meaningful rewards.
The evidence
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Thought provoking article. I fully agree that homework is often performative and not essential to the learning process. It is especially true of new learning tasks, where a teacher directs some discovery task of some new aspect of the curriculum.
On the other hand, homework that promotes retrieval pracitce (or should it be revision) is essential in giving students opportunity to do so in increasingly burdened curricula.
Too often students do not get enough spaced practice inside the classroom. I do not support the notion that a 5 minute do now is a purposeful retrieval as it is simply too short a time interval. What can realistically be retrieved in such a space of time beyond the declarative facts of a previous learning experience? If you try to practice application is 5 minutes ever going to get you beyond an introduction? As is often the case in schools the do now are often failed attempts at retrieval as students do not arrive early enough to lesson to complete the entire do now.
If you disregard the do now on the grounds outlined above where is purposeful SPACED practice actually happening in many classrooms? As most curricula is blocked, conveyor belt in nature and overburdened with content (that MUST be finished regardless of comprehension) it cannot be in all honesty happening often, if at all.
Don't even get me started on a spiral curriculum. The notion that we can have an interval gap of months or years before 'returning' to content in a classroom is simply absurd. Forgetting is imperative in learning, but not to the point the comprehended knowledge has become inaccessible.
This is where the retrieval focused homework/revision steps in. It is a means to ensure spaced retrieval practice is planned for and implemented in a timely manner. Homework allows for the spacing between retrievals to be reduced so that the forgetting curve is not allowed to drop to inaccessible.
This isn't easy, it is hard. Yes it requires effort to create a spacing calendar, yes it requires dedication to setting content regularly and thoughtfully and quite frankly, yes it requires teachers to prioritise REGULAR communication with parents and students to prompt nudge and cajole them into completing the retrieval. But, in all honesty anything that comes easy in education is fools gold. The amount of 'easy wins' I hear and see in books, ppd and blogs should lead to every teacher being able to conjure outstanding outcomes for their students. Unsurprisingly they often leads to non significant, impermanent improvement in outcomes. 'It shouldn't be hard' is a fools lament and maybe we should instead borrow the sentiment of Kennedy's famous phrase 'we do this not because they are easy, but because they are hard'.
If a school prioritises a rigourous programme of a retrieval based homework/revision programme it allows students to build character and genuinely sound learning habits. Retrieval based homework promotes solid foundations of memory formation and builds a school culture where hard work is acknowledged as being an agency of change.
I work in a school where over 60 percent of students come from a deprived background. My students do not benefit from the compounding impact of the 'silent education' received from professional parents and the private tutor knocking on the door when a student isn't getting it.
Homework, is a non negotiable for my students as they need to be given every opportunity to retrieve knowledge. I know for certain most of them will not be given opportunities to do so unless I, the teach directs them.
In that regard the last sentences of the article are right. Unfortunately, they are just a proposal and not a clarion call.
Spaced retrieval practice is a non negotiable in learning and homework that unlocks this is not unwasted toil, regardless of how much toil there is.