Over 54,000 children headed back to school last week after the summer holidays. Children of all ages started the annual routine of lessons and homework.

Thanks to our energetic and hard-working Minister of Education, Dolores Cristina, primary school students need not dread the stressful secondary entrance exams as the education reform aims for an inclusive system based on each student’s level of attainment in individual subjects.

Comments made by primary school children on their first day of school were the dislike on the subject of homework, which brings to mind what a prominent educationalist claimed: That setting homework for primary school children is bad for them because it leads to tension with their parents and makes slower pupils feel inadequate.

He added that evidence showed primary pupils would be better off without any homework.

However, the reaction from the Education Department was a prompt and harsh one as they contended that homework was vital to raise the standards of reading and writing.

This overall statement outraged supporters of traditional education methods who said it would benefit only bad teachers, too lazy to set homework.

The head of the Campaign For Real Education said this is the sort of thing that trendy teachers will love.

They will be able to claim that research shows that they should not set homework – “it will appeal to those teachers who do not want to do any work”.

The head of CRE added: “I note this isn’t new research. I would have thought the time would have been better spent looking at the exam results of schools where homework is set compared with schools where the pupils do not do any at all”. If pupils in primary schools do a little bit of homework, it helps them assimilate what they have learned and understand the work ethos.

The findings made from more than 100 studies, mainly American, concluded that primary school children would be better off without any homework.

The research said that the problems involved the families of pupils aged seven to 11 because parents would have to take on the role of teachers, involve themselves in the work and find suitable places to do it.

He added that “there is often a lot of extra tension between parent and child and a great deal of difference between the times it takes each child to do the work. A child taking considerably longer than a friend can be left with feelings of inadequacy... When all the children in the same class are set the same homework, weaker students will find it more challenging.

“Far from consolidating their learning, their homework may confront them with exercises they do not understand involving ideas they have not grasped”.

He said homework would engender “strong negative emotions” because children might not understand it and because of conflict at home, even if they were doing well at school.

There could be problems when homework led parents to take different views of their children “while one child may give the mother pleasure, another is a challenge and a third is a source of bewilderment and frustration”.

However, the Department of Education and Employment said that “modest amounts of homework – half an hour, for the oldest primary school children – are essential, particularly in the drive to raise standards in vital skills of literacy and innumeracy on which their life chances depend”.