Home Learning
At Vyners, we believe that all learners should have the opportunity to learn both at home as well as at school. Home learning is carefully planned as part of the curriculum in each subject and is essential for the following reasons:
- It extends students’ learning beyond the classroom to ensure students are appropriately challenged.
- It consolidates and reinforces knowledge and skills being developed at school, giving students an opportunity to practise their learning to fluency.
- It encourages students to develop the skills, confidence, and self-motivation needed to study effectively on their own.
- It facilitates retrieval practice and enables students to commit knowledge to long-term memory.
- It extends school learning (for example, through additional reading) and allows for a greater depth of study.
- It provides opportunities for pre-reading for future learning and supports literacy.
- It sustains the involvement of parents/carers in the management of students’ learning and keeps them in touch with what is happening in the classroom.
- It helps students to develop their time-management and organisational skills.
- It enables students to better manage the increasing demands placed on them as they get older, such as public examinations and the world beyond school.
Different subjects set home learning in their own specialist areas to enable students to make the best possible progress. Teachers, students and parents/carers have a shared responsibility when it comes to home learning.
The frequency of home learning depends on how often a student studies a particular subject and which key stage they are in. The quantity of home learning will increase as students progress through the school. In Year 7 each piece of home learning should be capped at 30 minutes, for example, and in Key Stage 4 students can expect to do home learning in their option subjects once a week and more often in English, maths and science. Home learning will also become increasingly challenging as students get older.
In the Sixth Form, the amount of work students will undertake independently outside class time will be considerable. Students need to take responsibility for this themselves. A rough rule of thumb would be to do at least one hour of revision, research or preparation independently for each hour of taught time, so a student taking 3 A Levels would need to do at least 15 hours of independent study.
The current Home Learning Policy can be found at the bottom of the page.
Vyners School utilises Google Classroom to set all home learning tasks. Students access Google Classroom throughout their time in school and are familiar with the platform.
Parents and guardians are invited to receive Google Classroom summary emails through the Google Guardian system. To set this up, you will require an invitation link that is sent out by the IT Support department in the school. If you are an existing parent and you have not yet received an invitation, please contact the school office, who will then forward your request to the IT Support department.
