Homework is vanishing: should teachers save it?

In his first years of teaching, Adrian Bethune assigned what he felt was necessary homework for his pupils. When parents would sometimes send a note saying a pupil “didn’t have time” to complete an assignment, Bethune had a hard time believing that was the case.

“In my head, I’m thinking: it’s 20 minutes. Of course you had time,” he says.

But after having his own kids, Bethune changed his mind.

“Our weekends and our evenings are really busy, often with sporting activities, going to see family that don’t live right on our doorstep,” he says. Some evenings, he can see his young kids are exhausted and ready for bed after dinner - getting out the homework to practise times tables or other assignments seems pointless.

Bethune, now an author and speaker focused on teacher and pupil mental health and wellbeing, says he’s not against all homework. But he’s concerned about what he calls “unhealthy” working practices for adults that seem to trickle down to pupils through required nightly work that happens after a full day at school - often buttressed by wraparound care, sports practice and after-school activities.

“We know the working practices of teachers in England, in the UK, the US and around the world are unhealthy. It’s very clear teachers are working far too many hours. They’re experiencing too much stress. I worry that we’re modelling that to children. We’re saying, ‘actually you need to act like us.’ So we’ve done all of this work in class, now you’ve got extra work to take home and spend your evenings doing.”

Does homework still have the same benefit?

Bethune’s view reflects a larger movement happening around homework that has as much to do with the rapidly shifting nature of work and technology as it does with schoolwork.

Teachers are assigning less of it, and pupils are doing less, part of what some experts are calling a “learning recession.” It’s changing how educators, parents and schools view schoolwork done outside of school hours.

Public sentiment on homework has always been shifty, swinging back and forth between being viewed as a somewhat necessary evil for extra practice and discipline, and “all pain and no gain”, as anti-homework crusader Alfie Kohn has put it.

But new concerns about chronic absenteeism, inequality between pupil groups, ongoing teacher workload and shortages, and AI being used for cheating have more people asking whether assigning homework even matters anymore.

Does homework have the same benefit it once did - and is the trade-off worth it?

Decline of homework

In the US, assigned homework has been on the decline for years, after a time of great enthusiasm for academic work, when even 4-year-olds were getting homework in preschool.

Due to increased testing and the push for common standards, which are the closest thing that the US has to a national curriculum, parents and schools alike have soured on it.

In a 2024 survey of American 8th grade math teachers, 49 per cent reported they assign just 15 minutes of homework per day, and 22 per cent say they assign no homework at all - up from just 8 per cent who never assigned homework in 2017.

Educators from high-poverty districts are more likely to assign less homework than their wealthier peers, and say over the past couple of years the amount of homework they assign has “decreased by a lot”.

According to a 2026 survey, UK pupils are likely doing comparatively more homework - pupils say they complete about five hours a week on average, with a majority saying they find assignments “moderately stressful”.

Yet UK parents spend less time helping pupils with their homework, and tend to worry more about pupils’ happiness and wellbeing.

Poorer pupils receive less homework help

Experts say that assigning homework can often exacerbate structural inequalities between pupil groups.

According to the Education Endowment Foundation, poorer pupils often have less access to quiet space and good internet, and receive less help from caregivers to complete assignments, putting them at a disadvantage.

In one American study, sociologist Jessica Calarco found that teachers often treated the lack of quiet space and extra help from family as pupil character flaws, and tended to emphasise individual responsibility, effort and lack of motivation to pupils instead of differences in access.

Pupils with at-home resources, including a parent being home, have “an advantage in being able to complete homework”, tending to reinforce existing inequalities, Calarco told American magazine Education Week earlier this year.

Parents also complain that homework assignments often must be addressed at the end of a very long day, cutting into already-hectic family time. When band practice starts at 7am, and wraparound care or the last sports practice ends after 6pm, or later, homework becomes another hour of “work” for young people after a sometimes 12-hour day.

“There is a difference between an eight-year-old and a 14-year-old, as far as what they’re able to handle, and how much learning they need to do outside of class,” says Bethune. “But what can happen is, you get this creep where adult life essentially is just pushed down onto teenagers, and teenage life is pushed down onto upper primary, and it’s like, whoa! Where’s childhood gone?”

Even though modern life might make homework more difficult to handle, research has shown that homework does influence achievement, according to the Education Endowment Foundation’s head of evidence synthesis, Jonathan Kay.

“We currently estimate an impact of five months’ additional progress compared with pupils who haven’t been set any homework,” Kay says. “That estimate may change with more information, but the general positive direction is clear.”

But what pupils do with that time really matters; Kay says evidence suggests the quality of assignments is more important than the quantity.

If schools want to make the case that homework still matters and get exhausted families on board, then understanding what homework is for becomes a vital question, says educator Tom Sherrington.

Homework helps pupils as much with building the muscle of independent learning skills as with extending learning time, he says.

“Sometimes people get upset about homework meaning literally home. People say, ‘Oh, but some people don’t have a good learning environment,’” Sherrington says. “So provide it and make it study time at school - [call it] ‘after-class learning’...so it doesn’t sound like it has to be done at home.”

Embedding homework

Extra time with challenging material makes a difference to pupil learning, Sherrington says. But assignments should be embedded in what’s already happening in class and subject-specific, teaching pupils along the way how to learn a particular thing.

Maths might require practice problems, while French might need a pupil to spend time with vocabulary, sentence structure and speaking out loud.

“As a teacher, you should be able to say to pupils that we have high expectations of them, go and learn it - and you teach them how to learn it. So how do I practise French? How do I learn geography? Do this, write this, do these notes, practise this, prepare for this quiz, or do this bit of writing,” Sherrington says.

“Homework becomes not like this extra burden. It’s not extra. It’s embedded. It’s integral to the whole thing,” he adds.

The need for assignments to be closely tied to classwork and designed to help pupils make progress in their learning might seem obvious, but many teachers will have felt the temptation to set a vague task, just to tick a box.

Growing up in an Indian school in Kuwait, Jo Castelino absolutely hated homework. “It was hours long, there was no support, and you were punished if you didn’t complete it,” she says.

When she began teaching science in England, she believed she’d absolutely never assign homework, not wanting to put her pupils through what she’d been through.

Over the years, she tried “fun” homework, or pupil choice assignments, believing it would make young people feel better than she had felt in school. But when Covid-19 hit, and she had to send assignments home to sheltering pupils, she saw how little ability her pupils had to work independently.

“I think there is value in teaching our pupils how to just practise things independently without our support and to feel confident in doing so as well,” Castelino says. “But there are so many things with homework that teachers do get wrong, and that is why people hate it.”

Pupils turning to AI for homework help

Castelino became so focused on how to get homework right that she published a book, The Homework Conundrum, to help busy teachers and families think about out-of-class assignments in a new way.

Setting homework without giving pupils the right support, letting them flounder without knowing whether they are on the right track, or not communicating the value of the assignment is just asking for pupils to not do it or turn to AI for answers, she says.

Overworked teachers might unknowingly communicate that the assignments just aren’t that important.

“Sometimes teachers, you know, they’re tired. They’ve got lots of things that they’re doing, and when they’re saying, ‘Oh, I’ve got this homework task for you,’ it’s almost like an afterthought,” Castelino says. “The way you say or you talk about it has an impact.”

She also praises pupils when they answer a question or provide an explanation in class that was connected to last night’s homework - connecting the dots for pupils that the work matters. “I praise that effort, and I praise their success in the lesson because of it, and I attribute that success to the homework,” she says.

Involving parents in homework

But many teachers and leaders have received little or no training on designing homework that works for all pupils and families, says Joyce Epstein, co-director of the Center on School, Family, and Community Partnerships at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, in the US.

Years of research have shown that homework is beneficial to pupils as extra practice and developing independent learning skills, she says, but busy teachers often don’t give much thought to an important factor for success - getting families involved.

Pupils in families already motivated to finish homework - often wealthier pupils who do well in school - get more of it as they progress to middle and high school, sometimes even becoming a badge of honour as to how much pupils do, widening the gap between pupils.

Pupils who could benefit the most from homework get assigned less and less as they progress through the grades, often because teachers have seen how their pupils don’t finish it.

“What I do see is teachers are very clear that after a point, struggling pupils often don’t do homework, so the teachers don’t assign much homework to those classes,” Epstein says. “If pupils in the middle grades stop doing their homework, then we need to design better homework.”

Epstein’s TIPS, or Teachers Involve Parents in Schoolwork, provides a framework to engage families in a number of ways with the school, including homework. Her research has shown that when families are invited to get involved with homework, pupils are more likely to complete it.

TIPS trains teachers to design assignments where pupils include their caregiver or family member - from telling families how fractions are used in everyday life, or wrangling a parent into becoming an assistant to a science experiment. Parents aren’t responsible for “teaching” subjects to pupils; they merely become a support system involved in the process.

‘Don’t set homework for homework’s sake’

While many schools try to get families involved in academics with events like family reading nights, Epstein says, long-term partnerships that help pupils improve over time need to be planned and well-structured.

“One family reading night will not raise children’s test scores, but begin to build a culture of good partnerships in that location. If the guidance is good, then more families begin to talk to their children about what they’re reading,” Epstein says. “You can’t just yell and hope that families get involved. It has to be a structured, planful - a continuous improvement process. It’s not magic, you know.”

Most seem to agree that setting homework is worth the effort, if it’s carefully designed and considers not only the ages of the pupils but families’ experiences as well.

“My experience of secondary school and the homework I had, that has definitely shaped my work ethic now,” Bethune says. Yet for his younger kids, who are 8- and 10-years-old, he feels like there needs to be some consideration of their need to unwind after school.

“Is this something the children are actually going to enjoy? In which case, it’s probably going to be quite easy to get them to do this. And if it’s not, if it’s going to be harder work to get them to do it, is there a real purpose behind it?” he asks.

Ultimately, he concludes, the key message that should guide a school’s approach must be: “Don’t just set homework for homework’s sake.”