It’s debatable who cheers loudest in our house when they come home announcing ‘there’s no homework tonight!’

Despite Michael D Higgins receiving hero status with our children when he suggested homework should be done in school, it certainly seems homework is here to stay for the foreseeable future.

Indeed, Irish 15 year olds are among the hardest working in the world, spending on average 7.3 hours a week on homework according to an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) study.

For busy parents it’s often seen as just another activity that needs to be fitted into the jigsaw of our evening, so what purpose does homework serve?

According to National Parents Council Primary (NPC), homework allows parents to become involved in their child’s learning, acts as a valuable insight into the sort of work our children are doing in school and how they are progressing.

“The purpose of homework in primary school is supposed to be to confirm to the teacher that the children have understood what the teacher has taught them,” says Deirdre Griffin, educational psychologist and trauma therapist.

“A big mistake that parents are making is they’re getting their homework perfect so it’s going into school perfect and the feedback loop gets broken.”

Cautioning against this stepping in, Deirdre advises instead writing a note in the homework journal to inform the teacher if extra help was required or a topic is not understood.

“There’s a stress on kids to have all of their homework complete,” adds Deirdre.

With an estimated 40% of our children neurodiverse this can pose an extra stress as “it might take them longer to get going, so initiating and wrapping their heads around the concept can take longer and their focus time is shorter."

With this in mind, Deirdre is an advocate of differentiated homework, whereby while a classmate might have five sentences for homework, with differentiated homework your child might be told to do two. They still do all the subjects such as maths, Irish, English, but the child gets to experience the success of completing all their homework.

“They still get to say ‘I did everything that was asked of me’, which is very important in terms of confidence, but also that ‘I was able to do it really well because I had enough time to do it’,” explains Deirdre.

Time-management is key for homework whatever age they are.

For secondary school students, “Encourage study in chunks of time, let’s say 40 minutes and then have a little break,” says Tadhg Crowley, President of Institute of Guidance Counsellors (IGC).

“Make sure the break doesn’t take them away from study altogether, so not scrolling through social media or something, but after a five-minute break taking a walk, they’d be able to get back into study for another chunk of time.”

Deirdre has come up with the idea of homework sticks for younger children, with different items that might interrupt homework written on lollipop sticks, such as ‘pare my pencil’, ‘go to the loo’ or ‘go on the trampoline’.

At the beginning of homework time, she recommends having it agreed with your child that you’re going to spend a maximum of 20 minutes for 1st class up or 40 minutes by 6th class doing homework, then they can pick whatever three lollipop sticks out of the jar they want.

“Have it agreed in advance that it’s 40 minutes of work,” advises Deirdre. “If that takes us an hour and a half because you’ve spent 20 minutes rolling around on the floor or whatever else might happen, so be it, but actually it’s 40 minutes of work.”

Deirdre suggests starting with their favourite subject first and their least favourite second.

“Your favourite thing gets you to the table and your least favourite you complete on the high of you doing your favourite and while you have the energy,” says Deirdre.

A suggestion for neurodiverse children is to offer to be their secretary in some instances such as for a creative writing story – rather than the stop-start of working out spellings they can just concentrate on the richness of the flow of their thoughts.

Alternatively, they can record themselves saying their story into a phone and then write it out listening to their own recording.

“It’s very hard to be creative while you’re doing something that’s difficult,” explains Deirdre, “so breaking that into two separate things can be useful.”

While we might monitor that homework is being completed and sign the homework journal, by the time your child moves to secondary, a parent’s role in homework diminishes.

“I’m very respectful of their agency in it,” says Deirdre. “As frustrating as it is, the best we can do in adolescence is be a non-judging presence. I think that’s all that we can do is keep saying to them, ‘I’m present and I’m interested and I’m going to let you dictate the level of involvement.’”

Deirdre recommends having a conversation with your teen, saying, “there’s no way that you’re going to go through the whole of your secondary school career without stumbling – that’s not going to happen – so, what are you going to do when it gets difficult? How are we going to help you when it’s tricky and here’s some ideas I have, have you got any ideas?”

Most importantly, impress on your child “don’t sit on a worry and let it fester,” concludes Deirdre. With homework, communication is everything.