By Chas Newkey-Burden
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Is homework pointless?
Kim Kardashian’s criticisms have got a big tick from some parents
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Too much too young: can homework in primary school negatively affect performance?
(Image credit: Sally Anscombe / Getty Images)
Chas Newkey-Burden, The Week UK
23 September 2025
Kim Kardashian has sparked a fresh debate about homework, saying she doesn’t “believe in it” because her children are already “in school for eight hours a day”. When they’re not in class, they should “play sports, live their lives” and “spend time with their family”, she said.
The reality star’s wishes for her own children, aged 12, nine, seven and six, have resonated with many British mums and dads, reopening the long-standing homework divide.
‘Unnecessary stress’
Homework for primary school children “doesn’t have a positive effect”, said Victoria Richards in The i Paper. In fact, studies have produced “stark” findings that doing too much homework can “actually send student performance back the other way” and is a “primary source of stress”, affecting “health” and “cutting into time spent with family and friends and hobbies”.
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So, why are we “making young kids do blind tests and extra equations on a Saturday when they’d be better off blowing off steam playing football or hanging out with their mates”? My kids are “exhausted” from school and “I don’t want their home” to “become another source of stress”.
Homework is “not compulsory by law”, said Georgina Fuller in The Times, but “many primary schools seem to set it for children as young as four”. In my experience, it “inevitably falls to the parents” and, judging by the queries in my school WhatsApp group about “spelling tests” and “maths equations”, this “causes lots of unnecessary stress for families”.
‘Understand the concepts’
Homework is still “an important part of schooling, if it has purpose”, Dr Emily Levy, a learning and academic skills specialist, told Newsweek. It “allows children to independently practise skills they learned at school and make sure they understand the concepts”.
And it actually has the backing of more adults than it used to. Nearly 70% of people think children should have homework, according to a study by the Policy Institute at King’s College London – a significant increase on 21% in a similar survey in 1937.
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Technology has also changed the face of homework: where pupils used to get given a textbook and told to cover them with “bits of old wallpaper to preserve them”, now they’re “issued with passwords, digital logins, dashboards and any number of online resources”, said Jennifer Powers in The Independent.
“The relentless march to digitise education is frustrating parents and harming children”. I think it’s “ironic” that schools “lecture parents and pupils” about “the dangers of too much screen time” but then require the “pervasive use of screens” for homework.
Chas Newkey-Burden, The Week UK
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Chas Newkey-Burden has been part of The Week Digital team for more than a decade and a journalist for 25 years, starting out on the irreverent football weekly 90 Minutes, before moving to lifestyle magazines Loaded and Attitude. He was a columnist for The Big Issue and landed a world exclusive with David Beckham that became the weekly magazine’s bestselling issue. He now writes regularly for The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, Metro, FourFourTwo and the i new site. He is also the author of a number of non-fiction books.
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