HOMEWORK MAY be the bane of children’s lives but school principals are also questioning its value.
In its submission to the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Education, the Irish Primary Principals’ Network said there was “little evidence to suggest that homework as we currently know it has any real benefit”.
The network’s director Seán Cottrell said the role of homework in the education system needed serious research and analysis.
He said homework caused stress between parents and children and eroded quality time in the evenings. It also had an impact on teaching time, he said, as time was lost correcting homework.
There was evidence to suggest that some teachers gave homework because parents expected it, he said. Some parents believed that a teacher who gave a lot of homework must be a good teacher. However, all the evidence showed that effective teaching in the classroom was more valuable than homework.
Mr Cottrell also called for “a radical review” of the way Irish is taught in schools. He said any policy on the Irish language must deal with the elephant in the room – the subliminal negative attitude towards the language.
Mr Cottrell said one strategy could involve treating Irish culture as a separate, compulsory language which would involve the study of songs, stories and humour. The study of the language should be treated as an optional subject at second level, he said.
The Irish Primary Principals’ Network said greater priority should be given to Social, Personal and Health Education (SPHE) and said it was “completely unacceptable” that more than 10 per cent of schools did not teach the Stay Safe programme.
The committee meeting had been called to discuss curricular reform at primary-school level. It heard several calls for greater parental involvement in schools and in their children’s education.
National Parents’ Council (primary) chief executive Áine Lynch said parental involvement was more important than social status or parental income in determining how well a student did at school.
She called for a national approach to parental involvement, led by the Department of Education. Any such strategy should also include teacher training colleges, she said.
Meanwhile, Irish National Teachers’ Organisation general secretary Sheila Nunan said the primary teaching degree should be extended to four years.
She said the time allocated to teaching maths in primary school was one of the lowest allocations in Europe and must be reviewed. Ms Nunan said the Government had committed to spending €150 million on schools’ ICT but just €22 million had been allocated to date.
