Homework

Homework Culture

Getting students ready for GCSE, further study and the world beyond school is vital and being able to organise themselves to complete review work, or homework is an important part of that.  However, we believe that homework should be:

• Meaningful (not setting tasks for the sake of it, and in a way where the students can see the value)

• Manageable (in terms of both amounts for students but also staff workload) 

We also recognise that we run an extended week (28 hours worth of lessons) and therefore our students are already doing considerable extra work, even before the very thorough intervention or enrichment programmes are considered.  For a number of our students, they are on an 8am-5pm day at school which is positive.

At Key Stage 3 we set homework each week across a range of subjects.  We don’t use a homework timetable or set amounts because homework should be used to genuinely support learning in the classroom.  It could take a number of forms including, for example, Sparxs maths or the setting of spellings.  Homework is optional and rewards are given out for those that complete additional work.  This homework will be in the form of review work or quizzing, so that no new material is ever set for homework.  If a teacher decides a piece of work is compulsory (e.g. an essay to be written) this will be communicated to parents using BromCom via “homework set”.

At Key Stage 4 each subject should set homework to complement the GCSE or V-Cert course, but we would expect these to be roughly weekly (in the core) or at a minimum fortnightly.  All Key Stage 4 homework is compulsory.  Failure to complete this results in a detention where we support the student to complete the work.

We strongly encourage the use of high value, low effort homeworks such as online or self marking programmes.