Homework: We all have it, we all hate it. There seems no way to avoid the extra work we bring home from school every evening. Or is there?

Right from the moment we start primary school, we are given additional work to do at home. Whether it be reading a book or learning times tables, from the first year at school we are set some form of homework.

And as we grow older, so the pile of homework grows on our desk.

Most junior school children are set spellings and times tables for testing once a week, plus additional work for over the weekend.

Once secondary school arrives, this changes to a couple of different subjects per evening, quite often due in the next day. It seems too much.

With the average school day consisting of five hours of lessons, plus lunch breaks and assemblies, we are in education for over half of our waking hours. Then, just when you think it’s time to go home for a rest, to watch television or hang out with friends, the reality hits - all this has to make way for homework.

Obviously the amount set per evening differs between schools and year groups – a Year 11 pupil, for example, would naturally be set more than a Year 7 – but ask any young person in the borough whether they were set homework during the last week, and the answer would be an almost resounding ‘yes’.

Let’s face it, how many teenagers actually like school because of the education aspect? To insist, then, that they must continue learning at home seems unfair and unjust.

Home life and school life should be distanced. After all, isn’t that what teachers say when they catch students playing on their PSPs under their desks?

Teachers claim that homework is set because there isn’t enough class time to complete the designated syllabus.

Surely, then, this is a failure by the Government to make school hours long enough to cover the work, and nothing to do with the students. We are being made to work during our own free time in order to compensate for the Government’s error.

Of course, there is the argument that homework enriches our learning, and enables us to do things unfeasible in the classroom. This is true - indeed, many tasks involving computers are better undertaken in the student’s own home, and with suitable parental assistance.

Yet there are ways to cheat on homework tasks, which the teacher will rarely recognise, and as such, will not know the areas in which students are failing.

Not everyone does their homework, and the majority of such students are punished by detentions, taking even more free time out of their day.

Surely it would be better to increase the amount of time spent at school, in order to make pupils’ spare time available to do exactly as they choose, rather than have much of it taken up every evening by homework.

Most students wouldn’t opt for an extra hour of school a day. Indeed, the majority would be against it. Yet would it be worth it if it meant all homework was abolished, and all your free time was exactly that, free?

By Sophie Morton, aged 17, from Welling