Developing Homework Club

Last term, Homework Club took the time to reflect on the service we’re providing and looked at ways to improve upon this. A big thanks goes to Kathy Dargavel, the former Head Teacher at our Walmer Road School and long-term supporter and volunteer at RPT, for conducting a piece of invaluable research that helped us identify best practice and ideas for development.

This research involved visiting other local homework clubs to look for good practice, interviewing commissioners and consulting with children, their parents and volunteers. Some of our volunteers helped with interviewing and analysing surveys. Thank you to Hayden Bajpai, Harry Maxwell and Jessica Swanson for their time supporting this piece of work.

Through this research we have learnt so much about the value of what we do and the impact on the children and parents, many of whom do not speak English well and have little experience of educational strategies in the UK.

All the interviewees felt that Homework Club supported their children effectively, made their children more confident with their learning and made a difference to their educational progress. All our parents said they would recommend RPT’s Homework Club to other parents, saying things like, “Before she came, she found everything hard, now she is good”, and, “It is like a best friend to us, it is a big, big help.”

We are already working on implementing some of the recommendations, building on our enrichment work, reviewing how we evaluate children’s progress and looking at how children can self-assess their own need for support. 

Thank you, to all the children, families and volunteers who completed the questionnaires and participated in focus groups.

Did you know?

Our Homework Club is entirely funded by RBKC and the Parents’ Association at Basset House School, so we would like to extend our thanks to both for their support for this incredibly important programme.

21st November 2019