Homework

New Mills School is committed to setting students homework that will allow them to make the most use of their time in lessons and make the best possible educational progress.

Throughout Years 7-11, students’ homework assignments are not set in line with a rigid homework timetable. Teachers will aim to set homework once a week, unless at a particular point in the curriculum where they might set more, or occasionally less. The guideline to teachers is not to set work with next day deadlines to avoid creating bottlenecks for students. However, if a homework task is short (10 minutes), it may be given with an overnight deadline. Obviously the type and amount of homework you are set will vary depending on where you have reached in your school career.

To support you in gaining a clear insight into what homework has been set, the school has invested in Class Charts. This is an online platform where all your homework will be detailed, including task instructions, deadline dates and links to the relevant resources. All students have been given usernames and passwords to ensure that you can access all the relevant information on the assignments you have been set to complete independently.
Nonetheless students should also write a reminder of homework assignments in your planner and clearly record the day it is due to be handed in.

Parents/Carers can also access Class Charts and become familiar with the work you have been set.

If you fail to complete a homework set, your teacher will record that on the school system and make a judgement about the best action to take. This might be a short detention or an extended deadline depending on the circumstances. Students who repeatedly neglect their homework will be followed up in line with the school’s homework policy and the relevant sanction or support will be put in place.

If you miss a homework because of absence, it is your own responsibility to catch up with not only class work, but the homework set.

Homework can take many forms. It might be a research homework that supports work to be done in the future or a consolidation task that allows students to apply the knowledge they have recently learnt at school. Homework might be a thinking or reasoning task, a written task, a reading task or a revision/learning task. In some subjects homework might be part of a longer term project which is spread over a half-term or longer.