Andrew Old's Education Battleground

Andrew Old's Education Battleground

PREMIUM: Homework Part 2

The problems of workload and scheduling

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Andrew Old
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Aug 31, 2025
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In Part 1, we wrote about how schools enforce homework. We also discussed how difficult it is to stop pupils from copying.

PREMIUM: Homework Part 1

PREMIUM: Homework Part 1

Andrew Old and Gwen
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Aug 30
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In this post, we will look at how homework adds to teachers’ workloads, and the difficulties with scheduling homework.

Homework and teacher workload

While different schools have different systems, it is often the case that setting homework, chasing homework, and marking homework feels like a punishment for teachers. In our experience, the sheer amount of effort involved can be out of all proportion to any educational benefit. A consistent problem is systems that create unnecessary workload. Every week, you could be taking in homework and marking thirty pieces of work per class for no obvious gain to you (the teacher) or to the pupils.1 When teachers are required to mark in detail, then, for some year groups, it is difficult to think of any homework tasks that are valuable enough to justify the time spent marking. In that situation, every opportunity to set work that minimises the marking has to be taken.

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