Home Learning

We believe that home learning is an important part of each student’s education, consolidating what they learn in school and helping to secure it in their long-term memory.

Home learning refers to any work or activity which students are required to do outside of lesson time for their subjects. Research indicates that it can have a very strong impact on the progress students make in their studies and this is why we see it as a key part of our curriculum. It is set regularly for all students and the typical amount set increases as students progress through the school.

View a Quick Guide to Home Learning here

Types

Home learning will vary from subject to subject, depending on the knowledge or skills which students need to develop. However there are some features which are likely to recur across the curriculum on a consistent basis, not only because they promote learning of the current content, but also because they instil excellent habits of independent study. These features are:

Practice

This is where students carry out a series of activities designed to embed knowledge or skills and develop fluency (e.g. mathematical equations or verb conjugations in languages). The aim is not to teach students new content, but to consolidate what they have learned in lessons. Practice can feel repetitive and students sometimes think this makes it pointless, but it is important that they persevere, because the consistency is what makes the learning stick and enables students to do it with ease in the end. A good comparison would be the repetition involved in learning to drive or the persistent drills carried out by a professional athlete.

Retrieval

This is a particular type of practice in which students attempt to recall information they have learned from their memory (e.g. through quizzes or flashcards). Our minds have a natural tendency to forget new material very quickly, even when we have understood it well, so interrupting the forgetting process is crucial. Retrieval is the most effective method we know of doing this and enables students to secure important knowledge in the long-term memory, where it will be easily accessible for future study or in exams. Retrieval is effortful and can be frustrating because it highlights what students cannot remember, but they need to understand that this effort is what makes it valuable and stick to the task, using their memory alone and not taking shortcuts by looking information up.

Reading

Reading serves various purposes in different subjects and at different stages of a student’s education. Early on it is crucial for the development of a broad vocabulary, which students need in order to comprehend the curriculum and access challenging texts at GCSE and beyond. It also familiarises them with key texts they are studying (e.g. in English at GCSE). As students move through the school, reading becomes increasingly important as an independent method of gaining new knowledge and broadening understanding (e.g. as part of A Level study). Finally, we hope that students will develop a love of reading simply because of the joy and enrichment it can bring to their lives and the use of Accelerated Reader in Key Stage Three is intended to promote reading for its own sake.

Online access/devices

All of our home learning is set via the Google Classroom online platform, to which students are given access when they enrol at Beaumont. They will need to organise themselves to keep track of their assignments and upcoming deadlines on a regular basis, checking Google Classroom daily.

Because students will need to access their home learning via Google Classroom, and because various tasks will also be completed online (e.g. on platforms such as Sparx Maths, Sparx Reader and Carousel), they will need access to a suitable device. We would recommend a laptop or Chromebook for this purpose rather than a smartphone. If there are barriers in the household to access to a suitable device, we would encourage parents/carers to contact the school in confidence via the student’s Form Tutor.

As a ‘guardian’, you can get email summaries of your child’s work and progress in a class. In email summaries, you can review:

• Missing work – Work not submitted when the summary was sent;
• Upcoming work – Work that’s due today and tomorrow (for daily emails) or that’s due in the upcoming week (for weekly emails); and
• Class activities – Announcements, assignments, and questions recently posted by teachers.

To get email summaries of your child’s work, you must accept the invitation from Beaumont. You have 120 days to accept an invitation before it expires. You can unsubscribe from summaries or remove yourself as a guardian at any time, but we encourage parents/carers to use the tool.

Further information about ‘Google Classroom for guardians’ is available here.

Routines

In order to maximise the benefits of home learning, students need to develop strong habits. This in turn depends on deliberate planning and routines, with tasks spread out over the course of the week and completed at consistent times. It is not possible for us to provide a timetable to indicate exactly when each piece of home learning will be set, because some subjects set work on a weekly basis and some less often, but the best approach is for students to set aside a regular slot when they will complete work for each subject. We ask teachers to allow students a full week to complete home learning tasks (or longer in subjects which set less frequently), so this approach, pursued diligently, will ensure that home learning is completed and can be submitted in a timely manner. We have provided suggested schedules for Key Stages Three and Four (below) which can be adapted to suit the needs of individual students and households.

In addition, we ask parents/carers to provide students with a quiet space suitable for work (a desk or table)away from distractions. Televisions and phones are known to draw the attention and reduce concentration on the task at hand, so we strongly advise that students complete their home learning without access to these devices.

Key Stage Three

At this stage we aim for students to complete around an hour of home learning per weekday across two (sometimes three) subjects. Most tasks are likely to take 20-30 minutes, although there are a few exceptions (e.g. home learning for Accelerated Reader is likely to take longer). ‘Little and often’ is a good principle at this stage. Home learning will be set in most weeks for subjects unless otherwise indicated in the schedule below.

Suggested Schedule:

Please note that this schedule is only a suggestion about when students should complete home learning and how they might divide up their time. We recognise that some students have more commitments at certain times than others, so they might wish to move some home learning around to free up a busy evening for other activities, doing more work on other evenings or at the weekend to compensate instead. Even if our suggested schedules are followed to the letter, it should still be possible for students to complete their home learning straight after school or during the early evening and still leave time for interests/leisure. We have also avoided scheduling extra tasks over the weekend, since we recognise that this is an opportunity for precious family time.

Any adjustments to the schedule are a matter for parents/carers to plan with their children and the school does not need to be informed of the outcome, but we do suggest that the home learning schedule becomes a shared possession within the family (e.g. it can be printed out and stuck on the fridge). This will help with the building of desirable routines and habits. Home learning tasks will not necessarily be set on
the days listed.