Home Learning 

When it comes to Home Learning our fundamental aim is to ensure that each and every one of our students is able to achieve their full potential during their educational journey as well as assisting parents and guardians in their God-given role as educators. As a school we value the fact that students should be exposed to a wide range of experiences. We feel that home learning and opportunities to play sport and music, read for pleasure and have important family time should coexist. We actively encourage participation on our after-school extracurricular clubs as well as our home learning club.

We believe that there is collective responsibility in that staff will set meaningful, manageable and motivating home learning tasks and pupils and parents have a responsibility to ensure that these are completed. Our teachers aim to provide high quality home learning that supports the Catholic ethos of our school in recognising the unique dignity of each individual pupil and their needs. Tasks should be suitably ‘scaffolded’ in order to provide balance and support the learner and cater for individual needs.

The logistics and rigidity of a home learning timetable, specifying the time allocated for different subjects on different evenings, mean it is not a viable option at Bishop Walsh Catholic School. However, the frequency of homework and generosity of deadline should allow all students to successfully hand in all home learning pieces. We believe that the careful mapping of home learning with a departmental Scheme of Work (SoW) should avoid peaks and troughs in the volume of home learning distributed.

Teachers will be mindful of setting revision only for their subject around the time leading up to and during Learning Cycle and Mock examination periods.

The Senior Leadership Team at Bishop Walsh Catholic School encourage staff to rest in their holidays. The same mantra should come from staff to students. Students work hard during the term, therefore no home learning should be set over half term holidays and minimal to no home learning set over the Easter and Christmas holiday excluding examination preparation. 

Students will always record each piece of home learning in their student planners. The planners are a fundamental piece of school equipment and this is why we check that students have theirs when they line up for school in the morning. Teachers will also log home learning as assignments on the Google Classroom platform.