Homework can be the bane of not only schoolchildren’s lives, but their parents’ too.

Because not only do many parents have to nag their kids to get their homework done, some feel they have to help them complete it as well.

But is that something they really should be doing – or is mum and/or dad helping with homework tantamount to cheating?

“Supporting your child with homework can be a real source of worry for parents,” acknowledges Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the NEU  (National Education Union). He points out that helping with primary school pupils’ homework can be beneficial if it takes the form of parents encouraging reading for pleasure and trips to the library, but warns that developing a routine to do individual studying at home is important for Key Stage 2 and in secondary school.

He adds: “Parents should try and encourage age-appropriate levels of self-study, but shouldn’t help their child do the actual homework.”

However, John Nichols, a trained teacher and tutor who is president of The Tutors’ Association, points out that while homework is normally appropriate for most students because it’s a chance for them to practice what they’ve learned in class, it’s not useful for them to spend a long time completely stuck, with no idea what to do.

“So if they don’t understand how to approach homework,” he says, “then it’s generally going to be more useful that they get some form of assistance than just to be left to deal with it on their own – obviously that won’t be very productive at all.”

However, he warns that helping a child with their homework should never be just giving them the answers, explaining: “Where help is offered, generally parents should try and help the students recognise what they might have been taught in the past and how it might apply, rather than just giving them answers.

“Giving them answers on its own is not going to be very useful, because it doesn’t mean the student realises how that answer should be derived or where they should get it from.”

Nichols stresses that the degree of help a parent gives will obviously vary by subject, and says: “There’s going to be some cases in which telling them an answer is actually a way of helping them to understand how to do it, whereas sometimes, in the worst case, just writing out sentences for them is of no use whatsoever, because it doesn’t reflect at all on how the student’s going to develop.

“So where any help is provided for homework, it should be with a view to teaching the student how to do the task rather than just completing it for them.”

If a parent does help a child with homework, it’s crucial for them to let the teacher who set the work know where they had the help, stresses Nichols, who says a short note in the margin by the work, or in the child’s school planner, will do the job.

“You need to communicate through a quick, short message to the teacher to say they couldn’t do this on their own, they did get some help, and that’s what enabled them to complete it,” he says.

“They need to be completely transparent with the school, to say that this is what the student could or couldn’t do independently, so they understand where there are gaps, and where the student’s going to need additional support.”

Nichols stresses there are times when assistance with homework “is not at all appropriate”, and explains: “One key example would be coursework. You have to be extremely careful with coursework because it makes up part of the student’s final grade. In some cases, it’s possible that students have received too much help with coursework and this completely invalidates their qualification because it needs to be their own work.”

But what about if parents need to get involved with their child’s homework in order for them to do it at all?

“One really important role for parents is to make sure the student actually bothers trying and puts in a reasonable effort,” observes Nichols. “It might be that you need to offer to assist with homework in some way to incentivise them to sit down and do it. Homework is only going to be of any value if the student actually does it.

“Just be conscious when you do sit down with them, don’t necessarily feel as though you have to give them all the answers in order to fulfil your promise, you just need to get them to sit down and give it a go for themselves. Fine if you need to give them a couple of pointers to get them on the right track.”

But he warns: “Parents should be wary of becoming a crutch for their students every single time. They shouldn’t be needed to help with homework on a routine basis to a significant degree, because then there’s something going wrong.”