Homework in UK Schools:
- Different schools have different views on homework:
- Some believe learning should happen mostly in school, with free time at home for other activities.
- Others believe homework is important for learning progress.
- It’s important to find a healthy balance between homework and other activities.
Primary School:
- Explore your child’s curriculum:
- Check the school website for information on topics covered in your child’s year group.
- Discuss these topics with your child.
- Support learning at home:
- Find age-appropriate books or practice books related to the topics.
- Help your child practice reading, spelling, and multiplication tables (tested in Year 4).
- Find fun online resources for practice.
- Seek teacher advice:
- Talk to the teacher about areas for development and how you can help at home.
- Connect learning to real life:
- Visit museums, zoos, and places of interest related to your child’s learning.
- Discuss these experiences together.
Secondary School:
- Explore the curriculum:
- Check the school website or ask the admin office for information on your child’s curriculum.
- Improve specific subjects:
- Make appointments with relevant subject teachers for advice on improving specific topics.
- Use resources:
- Buy practice books related to GCSE subjects.
- Visit museums and places of interest to connect learning to real life.
Remember:
- Everyday experiences can be learning opportunities for your child.
- Work with the school and find ways to support your child’s learning journey at home.
My child only gets one piece of homework a week. How can I ‘stretch’ my child’s learning?
Different schools have different policies and views around homework in the UK. Some schools, following the National Curriculum may believe that pupils are exposed to so much learning in school time, that home time should be more of an opportunity to develop social, emotional and physical learning. Other schools feel that there are not enough hours in the day to get everything in the curriculum covered in depth and that homework is vital to progress and enrichment. Personally, I feel that homework and ‘well-being’ time should be healthily balanced.
Take a look at your child’s school website to find out about the topics that are covered in your child’s year group and talk about these with your child. See if you can find some age-appropriate books or practice books on sale in bookshops or online that might help your child with these topics and set one or two of these pages or exercises for your child to complete. Ensure that they know the letters and sounds and spelling patterns commonly used in English and that they know their multiplication tables to 12 as they will be tested on these in Year 4. Find fun ways online to practise these too.
Talk to the class teacher and ask what you can do to stretch or improve areas of development for your child at home. Go out on visits as a family, where possible, to museums, zoos and places of interest that link to your child’s learning and talk about these together.
At secondary school, look at the school website to find the curriculum areas that your child is studying in that year or ask the admin office for advice where to find this. If you need to speak to a subject teacher about enriching your child’s learning, make an appointment to find out how you can do this in a specific theme or topic.
There are plenty of practice books on sale to help with different subjects at GCSE level but don’t forget to get out and about, wherever possible, to enrich learning in museums and places of interest linked to the topics being learned in school.
Learning opportunities are everywhere!
This question was asked by one of our parents during our recent webinar ‘Unlocking the Power of Parent-Teacher Communication‘ and was answered by a very experienced primary school teacher who has also held a Special Educational Needs and Disabilities Coordinator (SENDCo) role.
If you have any questions for our bilingual team (English and Cantonese), reach out via email contact@seven-springs.co.uk