The hardy old rose bush right next to the front door. Against all the odds, it just keeps on giving.

In a few hours the school at home project restarts again. One more 7 week push before we finally arrive at the summer holidays. What kind of Britain will it be? The old normal, the new normal or something else.

This afternoon was glorious. Hot (for here) and sunny. Unbelievably not a single cloud all day. This is Yorkshire remember.

Yes this is Yorkshire but sadly it’s connected to England. Which means it has to live with the Government’s take on education. So while the sun beat down, we were inside. Trying to get homework completed and revision to stick. It’s bizarre that we force kids to work during holidays and weekends AND yet we have a part time Prime Minister who avoids such weekend and holiday work at all costs…. Yet again one rule for the many and another much nicer rule for the few.

The really frustrating thing is what exactly is the homework achieving. Four hours today and what did our Son learn….

“What is the point of this Dad. I’ve not learnt one new fact. Not done anything which is interesting. I’m bored out of my mind. My hand hurts from writing and I dislike these subjects even more.”

Sadly I can’t argue with this. The school system here has been deliberately broken. Not by the teachers but by people in The Government. People who enjoyed the benefits of expensive private education. It’s not about developing individual kids now. It’s all about ticking political boxes for those in power. This government will not change its mind. But change is needed. So it will be local change.

We will continue with the school at home project until the summer. Remember this is not homeschooling….this is just trying to do exactly the same school lessons just not with the kids sat at a desk in the cramped classroom. In the summer our Son will decide what he does next. To go back to school or to go for full homeschooling. It’s his call. If he defers to me then he is leaving school. But what to do with the next 7 weeks. We have just brought in a new house rule.

Son will only be expected to do additional homework if it meets one of 3 conditions

  • He will actually learn something from it,
  • He will find it interesting,
  • It actually is going to contribute to his overall assessment. (Staggeringly much homework does not. Frequently it is not even marked in detail and sometimes not at all.)

We did have a fourth condition but that was dropped

“Dad that’s a pointless condition. How many kids will honestly admit to actually wanting to do a piece of homework. Definitely never me….”

So if a piece of homework does not meet one of these conditions then he won’t be asked to complete it. I will write into school and let the teacher know. If the school wants to push it then they can deal with me. In our house – I am the headteacher and remember I don’t currently have a PM…..

73 thoughts on “Homework”

  3. My granddaughter is going to a small college in September, where they will all be similar to her only 36 children, and 2-3 per teacher. She will have a t/a the first term. So happy for her. My son in law still doesn’t know if he will have a job to go back to.

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  6. I don’t even know you but am so proud you’ve made a stand. Totally rocking the parenting gig. Love love love your attitude and advocacy. Like so many systems it was designed broken so there’s no hope for a fix any time soon. Linda 🦄

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  9. I remember when my eldest son was at school, and the arguments we had trying to get him to do his homework. In the end I wrote to the headmaster and told him I was not prepared to spend every evening shouting at my son, and if he wanted to punish him at school for not completing homework, then that was up to him. It eventually occurred to me that my son’s homework was his problem and not mine. When he left school with dismal qualifications he only then realised he should have studied. He then got an apprenticeship with day release to college and actually enjoyed studying. He’s now an account manager for a national company. He told me much later that he was bored to tears at school.

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      1. I used to find that not all of it was marked either. My son’s school career was abysmal, but he started to study at college when he was interested in a subject, and never looked back.

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  11. Well said! It’ll be interesting to hear the school’s response! The thing about education – it isn’t only to do with the learning of facts; learning facts is only a small part – it’s what you do with the facts that matters, and actually your actions and behaviour as a result of learning requires skills and a holistic personal development, not just facts, where the ability to learn is paramount and the interest in doing so remains life long! All the best.

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  12. Last week Declan had an assignment to go around the house and measure things and create a bar graph. That would have been me having to go around and measure things and try to get Declan interested in the subject. Since they admitted to not checking assignments, we skipped it along with a few others. I agree, what’s the point with some of these?

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  13. There is abundant research, good, scientific research, that demonstrates unequivocally that homework is ineffective yet the education community as a whole persists and even as an educator I cannot tell you why. I have been against it for years.

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    1. Here we seem to be going backwards. I keep hearing the phrase – Victorian teaching and discipline values. As if that was such a time of enlightenment and progress. We basically are heading towards factory education. Minimise the input costs and produce a set range of outcomes. So frustrating. Really hope your doing well and smiling.

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  15. You gotta do what feels right. My education covered the transition from grammar schools to comprehensive schools. One a tory conceit, the other labour. Both were ideological and both shite, because they became political footballs. What saved both and me was not the syllabus but committed teachers. Ditto when my kids were at school in the noughties. Good luck with physics…

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    1. That’s the thing. For too long our Governments on all sides have been crap. Make things worse than how they found it. Too much interference by people who don’t understand the area. Let the professionals run the show. Today physics was ok, French a right #*##@#-£.

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      1. I quite agree.. the one area where our politics can work is in the select committees where they’re forced to work across party lines. I’ve often thought when i hear say the health select committee quiz the latest callow quisling of a minister or professional excusologist that they’d make a far better fist of it than governments. Even Jeremy Hunt… no hang on, I didnt just write that, did I?

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  21. I believe there is a middle ground to homework but few teachers bother to find it. Doing homework does help in the academic discipline of a child if there is something to be learned from it and if it is administered in the right doses. Homework can be a good thing even if most children plain hate the sight of it.

    The trouble is many teachers ignore the fact that there has to be wisdom and temperance in giving homework. Some see it as a professional failure not to dish out regular homework. Some forget that kids learn quite a few subjects in a day and if every teacher sees the need to give out tons of homework with mad deadlines, it breaks the kid in so many ways.

    Very few children enjoy homework – and it’s not always the teacher’s fault; that’s just the way kids are, we were kids once too. But it sure doesn’t help when teachers forget that they were young once and that they too must have hated homework.

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      1. If you’re referring to the teachers, maybe something has gone terribly wrong in their lives. When you live in a dark place, it’s hard to shine the light for others. I know it should never be an excuse, especially in dealing with young minds, but who knows what sorrows have hardened their hearts.

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  22. Good for you!!! I did get a chuckle out of the 4th condition! Whatever you and he decide, it will be with his best interests at heart, which is more than we can say about the government and school system.

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  23. Oh, and one more thing – that has got to be the most beautiful photo of a rose – and I’ve come across quite a number.

    At the risk of sounding like a tacky money-grubber, maybe you could collaborate with Pixabay or something…. some side income…

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