At SJB, it is felt that work completed at home is an essential part of school work. When homework is used properly, it extends the challenge open to the students and ensures that teaching time is used to maximum effect. It also prepares students gradually for the more independent demands of study as they mature. Equally, we believe it is important that all students have time in their day to ‘play’ and spend time participating in extra-curricular activities. For this reason, our homework gradually increases from 50 minutes per night in Year 7 to around 1.5 hours per night in Year 11 and 2-3 hours per day in the Sixth Form.

In Year 7 and 8 there is a blend of ‘subject’ homework as well as the development of literacy and numeracy skills; every night students will complete 30 minutes of ‘subject’ homework as well as a further 20-30 minutes of homework focused on the development of literacy and numeracy skills as we believe these are fundamentally important in being able to access learning across the curriculum. From Year 9 onwards there is a greater ‘subject’ focus. Further to this, each half term, there will be a minimum of one homework aimed at improving vocabulary and one aimed at improving your child’s reading and comprehension skills.

We set homework for the following reasons:

• It encourages students to develop the skills, confidence, and self-motivation needed to study effectively on their own.
• It consolidates and reinforces knowledge and skills being developed at school.
• It extends school learning (for example, through additional reading).
• It sustains the involvement of parents in the management of students’ learning and keeps them in touch with what is happening in the classroom.
• It helps students to develop their time-management and organisational skills.
• It enables students to better manage the increasing demands placed on them as they get older and become young adults.

HOMEWORK TIMETABLES

Please ensure that the homework timetables are followed carefully – they are designed to help the students plan their time each evening and show the night the student is able to do each subjects homework so please make sure homework is set in advance of that day in the fortnight and is due in after it. There is no formal schedule for Year 12/13 homework, it is assumed that you will be setting 12 hours of homework a fortnight (ie. 1 hour per lesson). With the double lessons next year you may need to be a little more flexible than previously with deadlines etc to enable students to plan their time and get tasks done, this is something that will need working out with Sixth Form classes individually so that it works for them.

You might find this blog interesting https://classteaching.wordpress.com/2023/06/16/in-an-ever-more-technological-world-does-homework-still-have-a-place-yes/

Things to consider:

• Homework tasks should be planned so that they support/complement the overall curriculum plan.
• Homework tasks for KS3 are an excellent opportunity to develop literacy skills – reading, vocabulary and comprehension. Please aim to ensure that each half term the students are exposed to at least on vocabulary based task and one reading/comprehension task.
• Marking of and feedback on homework tasks is vital; students must feel like the work they are doing at home is valued and valuable.
• What you believe is a 30-minute task may take some 15 minutes and others 1 hour. It should be made clear to students that they should not spend more than the set time on their homework even if the work is not complete.
• Students should be able to gauge whether the homework they completed in 30 minutes is acceptable for the level they are working at (ie. Linked to the KS3 Frameworks & GCSE target grades)

 Timetables can be found here