Tiffin Boys’ School, a well respected private school, has cut the amount of homework given to pupils. The students used to do anything up to 4 hours a night, but the head teacher, Sean Heslop, says that this is too much and the quality of the homework set was poor; often ‘repetitive’ or ‘mechanistic’. He has cut the amount to 40 minutes a night, following the lead of some other well known public schools.
Homework is not complusory, but the government likes it and recommends that all children of primary school age should be doing at least 30 minutes a night, rising totwo and a half hours for older children. many teachers hate it, seeing it as a pointless ritual of giving and marking mundane tasks just because they have to.
I agree with the head of Tiffin when he says,
” If there’s one way to put students off learning, that’s the way to do it.”
Homework has always been a difficult issue for many parents, far better if they spend some quality time with their children pursuing other interests.