Homework: an outdated concept?

HW is a terribly outdated concept, but unfortunately the government has seen fit to place an expectation on Ofsted that its inspectors look at the HW being set in schools. You’ll find the word “homework”  in all the grade descriptors for teaching.
I’d rather see HW replaced by an expectation that pupils must access learning outside the classroom (LOC) in every topic and subject that they study. Shift the onus from the teacher setting a LOC task to the pupils using whatever media they wish to access to boost school learning (*not* classroom learning – there are far more to schools as a learning environment than classrooms).The “flipped classroom” could really help in this, where pupils study the topic they are about to start in school, before they start it. I have this vision of a 15-y-o boy, to whom doing HW would not go down well with any of his peer group, pretending this mates that he’s texting his girl/boyfriend when in fact he’s watching a podcast of his teacher introducing the simultaneous equations that his class are about to start P3 that morning…..and I don’t think that is just a dream either.
Learning is about to evolve and it will have less to do with teachers and schools and more to do with meeting the needs of pupils in a way which places them at the heart of learning. That involves a different mind-set from teachers who would become a part of what a pupil could choose to access to learn in order to achieve their targets and not the “leader” of that learning and the holder of those target grades. i.e. true assessment for learning.Now we just have to convince a government whose cabinet didn’t go to private schools where prep was the supervised and enforced law for 2 hours after each day’s teaching – and of course, they’ve done ever so well so therefore it must have worked.
Through joint lesson observations, and/or learning conversations with staff, QA South-West can work on these concepts with staff. Paul has developed a model of outcome-led, pupil centred learning which can be used in the next stage of your teachers’ development. It can make the difference between improving the quality of teaching in your school from good to outstanding overall. Really it can make the difference between good and outstanding learning  in your school, but it’s not that, per se, that is judged!