I was around 11 when I had to stage an intervention with my father.

Sitting him down, I explained that I loved him very much - he was my dad and nothing would ever change that - but things had reached a crisis point and we needed to address it.

He really needed to stop doing my homework for me.

I’d collected the grades and the merits for the art project on Wassily Kandinsky and the food tech poster on healthy eating, but I had a niggling sensation that homework was meant to be more than an excuse for my dad to show off his (admittedly excellent) PowerPoint skills.

It turns out my preteen brain had unwittingly latched on to something that the Education Endowment Foundation would go on to quantify in 2019: that homework at secondary school is valuable. It can, in fact, lead to an additional five months of progress when compared with no homework being set.

Is that with, or without, parental help? It is impossible to know. And that’s the point with homework: it’s too complex to have a polarised argument over. But that’s what we always end up with.

Halloween is coming up and you only have to ask about homework in some quarters for a very specific bogeyman to be conjured up: a big craft project that involves lots of time, with zero guidance and very little relevance to topics being studied in class - and that is mostly completed not by a child, but by their parents. But how much homework set is actually of that ilk? Very little in primary; I’d wager none at all in secondary.

Ask others and you get a homily on the benefits of working at home - with a full set of 21st-century skills a child can add to their CV. How much homework can honestly meet those expectations?

When we use the tired anecdote of parents having to create a cardboard masterpiece on their children’s behalf, or vague claims of non-academic gains, we risk needlessly polarising the debate. It becomes no homework vs any homework. But just as one painful weekend spent constructing a volcano out of papier-mâché does not mean all homework is bad, the EEF research does not give carte blanche to any homework: bad homework is as ineffective as no homework at all.

And a debate without agreeing an end goal of homework is a complete waste of time. Is it so wrong if a parent takes an interest or lends a hand to their child’s efforts? If direct learning goals - ie, increased performance on a set task - are the only aim, then heavy parental involvement may be inappropriate. But we should ask if this should be the main focus of homework. For example, is it an acceptable aim for homework to increase more general things: self-confidence, agency, family involvement in their child’s education, creativity, physical activity, metacognitive skills?

Wrapped up in this is a thornier issue: is the infringement of school tasks on non-school time the right of a school? We seem preoccupied as to whether homework is useful, not whether it is right that a school dictates a child’s time away the classroom.

These are not easy issues for anyone (let alone parents) to tackle. It is much simpler to create a yes/no argument. But they are issues that we must address because they underpin all other arguments around the subject. In our cover feature this week, Steve Higgins and Lee Elliot Major try to kickstart a more grown-up conversation about homework - one that looks at these very conundrums. It should facilitate a better discussion.

The best homework I had when a student forced me to think creatively, especially when I didn’t know the answer and didn’t have a teacher on hand to guide me. I’d go so far as to say it partially shaped the independent worker I am now - someone who’s able to write whole articles without any sort of help from my dad. Honest.

@Sarah_Cunnane

This article originally appeared in the 25 October 2019 issue under the headline “Fear not the bogeyman - the homework debate is far scarier”