If a student spends extra time practising a skill then it seems reasonable to expect that student to improve in that discipline. Homework does seem to give a great number of parents a degree of comfort that their child is trying their best and the successive British governments that have represented those parents have instructed that homework be set in schools. For that reason, the setting of homework is a school policy and a parental expectation. It is interesting to note that the government do not supply research or academic evidence for this insistence – only that they believe it is beneficial and that the practice is popular with their voters. Hard working students, who put in many hours of work outside of school, do often achieve high results. Learning, however, is a very complex process and unfortunately does not invariably obey the simple rule of the more you put in the more you get out. How else could examples of students who do great amounts of extra work but who achieve the same or lower levels than peers who do less than them be explained? Or, indeed, individuals who seem to struggle in applying themselves to work outside of the classroom yet achieve highly in tests and examinations? Homework can be seen to have obvious, commonsense benefits but academic research on the practice forces us to regard it with caution. It is not a silver bullet for every educational problem. In fact, the three highest performing nations in terms of educational achievement (Japan, Denmark and the Czech Republic) have policies of assigning little in the way of homework, whereas countries such as Greece, Thailand and Iran – which have some of the worst test scores in the world – also set the most homework. A 2006 study review over 180 academic studies into homework and its effects by Professor Harris Cooper of Dukes University found that there is very little correlation between the amount of homework set /accomplished and achievement in school. Even in secondary schools, “too much homework may diminish its effectiveness or even become counterproductive”. It should also be recognised that homework as an issue results in a great deal of unproductive conflict between children and their parents, students and teachers and parents and schools. The homework tasks supplied here take some of these concerns into account and are designed to encourage long-term habits and commitments beneficial to students within English and other subjects. They are largely skills-based, easy to engage with, build in some element of choice for the student, differentiated and cyclical – constantly returning to and building upon previous knowledge and abilities. Through this strategy, students over time should develop skills that help them meet the demands and expectations of performance later on in the school.
