It’s 8:17pm on a Sunday evening. My daughter is crying over her maths homework whilst I’m trying to explain how to find the nth for the umpteenth time. My wife is attempting to help our eldest research the Tudors on a device she’s barely allowed to use during the week. Nobody is enjoying this. The roast dinner sits heavy in our stomachs. Tomorrow’s school run looms. This isn’t quality family time. This is unpaid educational labour dressed up as “parental engagement.”

And when I dare suggest to other parents that perhaps schools are taking the piss by colonising our evenings and weekends, I’m met with the same tired responses: “But children need to consolidate their learning.” “It teaches responsibility.” “If you don’t do it, they’ll fall behind.” The implication is always the same: if you’re not willing to sacrifice family time on the altar of academic reinforcement, you’re somehow failing your children.

This is gaslighting. Not the casual misuse of the term that’s become fashionable, but genuine psychological gaslighting, where an institution makes you doubt your legitimate concerns by reframing reasonable resistance as inadequate parenting. Some schools have become what sociologist Lewis Coser called “greedy institutions” - organisations that demand total allegiance and expand their claims on members’ time, finances and energy far beyond their formal mandate.

The question we should be asking isn’t whether parents should support their children’s learning. It’s whether schools have any business dictating how families spend their non-school hours.

The Language of Colonisation

Let’s examine the rhetoric schools use to justify homework. 

Parental engagement.

Learning reinforcement.

Building independence.

Preparing for secondary school/college/university/life.

Each phrase sounds reasonable in isolation. Together, they form a sophisticated apparatus of boundary violation.

Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild’s research on work-life boundaries provides a useful framework here. In her 1997 book The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work, Hochschild examined how corporations colonised workers’ personal time through manufactured obligation. Work expanded into evenings and weekends not through explicit demands but through cultural expectations and implied consequences for those who didn’t comply.

“The more women and men do what they do in exchange for money and the more their work in the public realm is valued or honoured, the more, almost by definition, private life is devalued and its boundaries shrink.” Arlie Russell Hochschild

Schools have adopted precisely this strategy. They don’t typically mandate homework through formal policy. Instead, they create cultures where not doing it marks you as uncommitted, where teachers can claim they’re “just following curriculum requirements,” and where parents who push back are positioned as obstacles to their children’s success.

Organisational psychologists Blake Ashforth, Glen Kreiner and Mel Fugate’s work on work-home boundaries helps us understand what’s happening here. In their research, they identified how organisations use “integration tactics” to blur the lines between work and personal life. Schools have mastered these tactics: sending homework home on Fridays to “consolidate the week’s learning,” assigning projects over half-term “to prevent learning loss,” and framing weekend work as “enrichment opportunities.”

The escalation is striking. Research by the Department for Education shows that in 1995, primary school children spent an average of 30 minutes per evening on homework. By 2015, this had risen to over an hour. For secondary students, the increase is even more dramatic – from 45 minutes to nearly two hours. This expansion has occurred despite growing evidence that homework’s educational benefits are marginal at best, particularly for younger children.

The UK government’s own homework guidelines, where the official laws were scrapped and headteachers given autonomy in 2012, suggested 10 minutes per year group per night for primary pupils. Yet schools routinely exceed these recommendations, often doubling or tripling them. When challenged, they cite the need to “prepare children for the next stage” or “meet parental expectations.” It’s a circular justification that places schools beyond accountability.

Coser’s concept of greedy institutions argued that certain organisations - monasteries, political movements, and yes, educational institutions - demand total commitment from their members, resisting any competing claims on their time and loyalty. The truly greedy institution doesn’t just want your working hours; it wants your weekends, your evenings, your family dinners, your holidays.

Whose Interests Does Homework Actually Serve?

If homework genuinely boosted educational outcomes, we might at least debate whether the colonisation of family time is justified. But the evidence doesn’t support even this pragmatic defence.

John Hattie’s massive meta-analysis, synthesising over 800 studies on educational interventions, found that homework has an effect size of 0.29 – below the threshold of 0.40 that Hattie considers necessary to justify an intervention. More tellingly, for primary-age children, the effect size drops to near zero. In plain English, homework does bugger all for young children’s academic progress.

The research gets worse. Harris Cooper’s comprehensive review of homework studies, published in the Review of Educational Research in 2006, found no evidence that homework improves academic achievement for elementary school students. None. For secondary students, he found modest benefits, but only when homework assignments were carefully designed, properly explained, and limited to reasonable amounts - conditions rarely met in practice.

A 2012 study by Gerald LeTendre and David Baker, published in the American Journal of Education, compared homework practices across 50 countries. They found no relationship between the amount of homework assigned and national achievement levels in mathematics. Countries with high homework loads performed no better than those with minimal homework. In some cases, they performed worse.

But perhaps the most damning research comes from the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) data. Their 2012 analysis found that students in high-performing countries like Finland and South Korea spend far less time on homework than UK students, yet consistently outperform them. The relationship between homework hours and achievement is not just weak; it’s often inverse.

So if homework doesn’t meaningfully improve learning outcomes, whose interests does it serve?

Schools benefit by demonstrating “rigour” to Ofsted and parents. Teachers benefit by having evidence they’ve “covered the content.” Senior leaders benefit by pointing to homework policies as proof of high expectations. But children? Families? They’re sacrificing valuable time for an intervention with minimal educational return.

The equity dimension makes this even uglier. The Sutton Trust’s 2018 research found that disadvantaged pupils spend less time on homework than their affluent peers, not because they’re less committed, but because they lack the resources, space, and support that homework assumes. A child in a cramped flat with three siblings and parents working evening shifts cannot complete homework under the same conditions as a child in a detached house with a dedicated study space and university-educated parents available to help.

Homework doesn’t level the playing field. It tilts it further towards those who already have advantages, then blames struggling families for “not prioritising education.”

Philosopher Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative offers a useful test here. Kant argued we should act only according to principles we’d want universalised. Would we want all organisations - employers, community groups, sports clubs - to usurp family time the way schools do? Would we accept our employer insisting we complete work tasks every evening and weekend “for our professional development”? If not, why do we accept it from schools?

The Gaslighting Mechanism

Gaslighting, properly understood, isn’t just lying. It’s a systematic process where someone manipulates you into doubting your own perception of reality. The term comes from Patrick Hamilton’s 1938 play Gas Light, where a husband deliberately dims the gas lights in their home whilst insisting his wife is imagining the change, making her question her sanity.

Schools engage in precisely this behaviour when parents express concerns about homework demands. Watch how the conversation typically unfolds:

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Parent: “My child is spending two hours every evening on homework. It’s affecting family time and sleep.”

School: “We value family time tremendously. Our homework policy is designed to support learning, not burden families.”

Parent: “But the actual amount being set exceeds your stated policy.”

School: “Teachers use professional judgement to match homework to individual needs. Perhaps your child needs some support with time management?”

Notice the shift. The parent’s legitimate concern about policy violation becomes reframed as the child’s time management problem. The school’s breach becomes the parent’s inadequacy.

Psychiatrist R.D. Laing studied these institutional double-binds extensively in the 1960s. In the homework context, the double-bind works like this:

- If you help your child with homework, you’re creating dependency and preventing independence.

- If you don’t help, you’re failing to support their learning and demonstrating poor parental engagement.

- If you complain about the amount, you lack commitment to education.

- If you comply without complaint, you validate the system’s demands.

There’s no winning move. The institution has structured the situation so that your legitimate concerns can always be reframed as personal failings.

The guilt machinery is sophisticated. “Your child will fall behind” plays on parental fears whilst obscuring the fact that homework’s contribution to achievement is minimal. “Other parents manage it” weaponises comparison whilst ignoring vast differences in family circumstances. “We’re preparing them for secondary school” shifts responsibility onto future institutions’ demands rather than questioning whether those demands are themselves reasonable.

This is particularly insidious because schools genuinely believe they’re acting in children’s best interests. Teachers aren’t malicious. They’re trapped in a system that measures success through visible outputs - completed worksheets, research projects, reading logs - rather than genuine learning. The gaslighting isn’t conscious manipulation; it’s institutional culture operating beyond individual awareness.

Carl Rogers, the psychologist who developed person-centred therapy, wrote extensively about how institutions create conditions that prevent authentic human connection. In his 1961 work On Becoming a Person, one of the most poignant pieces of writing on humanity, Rogers argued that genuine growth requires “congruence” - alignment between what an organisation claims to value and how it actually behaves. Schools claim to value family time, wellbeing, and work-life balance whilst simultaneously demanding hours of evening and weekend labour. This incongruence creates precisely the conditions for gaslighting to flourish.

“The degree to which I can create relationships, which facilitate the growth of others as separate persons, is a measure of the growth I have achieved in myself.” Carl Rogers

The Emotional Labour Transfer

What schools actually expect when they send homework home is that parents will become unpaid teaching assistants, behaviour managers, and motivational coaches. That we'll perform what Arlie Hochschild termed "emotional labour" - the exhausting work of managing our own frustration whilst radiating supportive energy. That we'll do this after our own working day, using skills we may not possess, for outcomes the school cannot demonstrate are worth achieving.

This isn't acknowledged as work. It's framed as "involvement" or "engagement," as if managing a tired eleven-year-old through multiplying fractions (that vital skill for the future!) whilst simultaneously cooking dinner is some kind of enriching family activity rather than unpaid professional labour.

The costs are measurable. A 2019 Family Lives survey found that 64% of UK parents reported homework causing family stress weekly. Over a third said it caused arguments. One in five felt inadequate as parents, not because they're failing, but because schools have successfully transferred responsibility for educational outcomes from institutions with professional training to families with Netflix subscriptions and mounting exhaustion.

The gender dimension is particularly ugly. A 2017 study in the British Educational Research Journal found mothers spend 90 minutes more per week than fathers on homework help. For working mothers, this represents what Hochschild called "the second shift" - unpaid domestic labour after paid work - now extended into a third shift of educational support. Schools don't acknowledge this disparity. They simply assume someone will do the work, and that someone is statistically likely to be female.

The system requires a parent who doesn't exist: available every evening, educated enough to explain curriculum content, English-speaking, with stable housing, adequate space, and infinite emotional bandwidth. When real families with real constraints can't meet these assumptions, the problem is located in their dysfunction rather than in the institution's unreasonable demands.

This is how responsibility gets offloaded. Schools set homework knowing full well that completion depends on family circumstances beyond the child's control. When middle-class children with supportive environments succeed and disadvantaged children without them struggle, schools can point to "parental engagement" as the differentiating factor. The structural inequality they've created becomes evidence of individual family failure.

What would happen if we named this honestly? Schools would have to acknowledge they're demanding significant unpaid labour from families. They'd have to justify why parents should spend evenings performing teaching tasks that professionals struggle to accomplish during school hours. They'd have to confront the fact that homework doesn't just measure learning - it measures access to social and cultural capital.

But naming it honestly would undermine the entire apparatus. Better to keep the costs invisible, borne privately by families who've learned to see their evening battles as personal inadequacies rather than institutional exploitation.

What Would Genuine Boundary Respect Look Like?

I’m not calling for homework abolition; that’s too crude an instrument for a complex issue. What I’m demanding is honest reckoning with boundaries and acknowledgement that family time has value independent of its contribution to educational outcomes.

Genuine boundary respect would start with schools asking rather than assuming. Before setting any homework, they’d need to answer: What specific learning outcome does this task achieve that cannot be achieved during school hours? Is this outcome significant enough to justify colonising family time? Have we consulted families about whether this trade-off is acceptable to them?

These aren’t radical questions. They’re basic respect for the fact that families have legitimate claims on their own time.

Some schools have started moving in this direction. In 2016, Philip Morant School and College in Colchester abolished homework for all pupils. Principal Catherine Hutley directed teachers to use the time previously spent on setting and marking homework on planning lessons more precisely.

The results? Pupil wellbeing improved. Family feedback was overwhelmingly positive. And academic outcomes? They remained stable. The homework wasn’t contributing anything worth the cost.

Similar experiments in other areas have produced similar results. Children and parents at Inverlochy Primary in Fort William voted to scrap homework almost ten years ago. William Ford C.E Junior School proudly announce on their website that  they do not set homework. In each case, schools offered optional activities for families who wanted them, but removed the mandatory element and the guilt machinery surrounding it.

Internationally, Finland provides an interesting model. Finnish students consistently rank among the highest performers in international comparisons, yet they’re assigned minimal homework, typically 30 minutes or less per evening. The Finnish system trusts that effective teaching during school hours is sufficient. They recognise that children need time for play, family, rest, and unstructured exploration.

This isn’t some impossible Scandinavian fantasy (and I acknowledge there have been some recent less positive stories coming out of Finnish education). It’s a policy choice that reflects different values about what childhood should contain.

Genuine boundary respect would also mean schools acknowledging their homework policies as what they are - demands on family time - rather than hiding behind euphemisms like “home learning” or “extended study opportunities.” It would mean being honest about the limited evidence supporting homework’s effectiveness. It would mean accepting that when parents push back, they might have legitimate concerns rather than problematic attitudes.

Most fundamentally, it would mean schools accepting that they don’t own children’s entire waking lives. They have children for 6-7 hours per day, 190 days per year. The remaining time belongs to families, and what families choose to do with it, whether that’s playing football, cooking together, watching television, or doing absolutely nothing, is none of the school’s business.

Reclaiming Family Time

The scene that opened this piece doesn’t have to be universal. Sunday evenings don’t have to be overtaken by institutions. Tears over homework aren’t inevitable developmental experiences; they’re the predictable result of boundary violations we’ve been taught to accept as normal.

When schools systematically expand their reach into family time, when they pathologise parental resistance, when they shift educational responsibility from institutions to homes without acknowledging the costs, they’re not just being unreasonable. They’re engaging in a form of institutional gaslighting that makes families doubt their right to control their own time.

The question isn’t whether parents should support their children’s learning. Of course we should. The question is whether schools should dictate the terms of that support, colonise family evenings and weekends, and frame resistance as inadequate parenting.

I reject that framing entirely.

Family time has intrinsic value. It doesn’t need to be productive, educational, or enriching to be worthwhile. Sometimes families need to do absolutely nothing together. Sometimes children need to be bored. Sometimes Sunday evenings should be sacred spaces for watching rubbish television and eating too many biscuits.

These aren’t failures of parenting. They’re essential components of a life well-lived.

The challenge to you, reading this, is simple: What would you defend about your family time? What boundaries would you draw if you didn’t fear being labelled as insufficiently committed to your children’s education? What would family life look like if you reclaimed the evenings and weekends that institutions have colonised?

Your instinct that homework is taking the piss might actually be correct. Your sense that family time is being unreasonably colonised might be entirely legitimate. Your resistance to institutional overreach might be the healthiest response available.

Stop doubting yourself. Start questioning the institutions that benefit from your doubt (and I say that as an educator and chair of governors!)

Key Takeaways

The evidence doesn’t support the practice - Meta-analyses consistently show homework has minimal effect on primary pupil achievement and only modest effects at secondary level. OECD data shows no relationship between homework hours and national achievement. We’re sacrificing family time for negligible educational gain.

Homework exacerbates inequality - The practice assumes stable homes, available parents, adequate space, and educational resources. Disadvantaged families are penalised for lacking conditions that middle-class families take for granted, then blamed for “not prioritising education.”

Schools have become greedy institutions - Using Lewis Coser’s framework, schools demand total commitment, expanding their claims on family time beyond their formal mandate. This represents institutional overreach dressed up as educational necessity.

The gaslighting is systematic - When parents express legitimate concerns about homework demands, schools reframe the problem as parental inadequacy or child dysfunction. This double-bind prevents families from effectively challenging unreasonable demands.

Homework transfers significant emotional and practical work to families, particularly mothers, without acknowledgement or compensation. The stress, conflict, and exhaustion this creates are positioned as private family problems rather than costs imposed by institutional demands. Schools that have reduced or eliminated compulsory homework maintain academic outcomes whilst improving family wellbeing. The question isn’t whether families should support learning, but whether schools should dictate how families spend their non-school hours.