Parents about homework guidance.

Parents about homework guidance.

Parents guide their child at home with schoolwork in different ways. Most parents guide their child themselves and see homework help as a shared responsibility of parents and school. However, there is also a considerable group that hires professional homework help. In addition, parents are often not satisfied with how much the school guides their child. This appears from a study among parents in the Landelijk Ouderpanel.

Help With Homework

About half of the children get help with their homework. Most of these children get help from their parents or from family or friends. Homework help mainly involves help with planning and doing homework and extra lessons for specific subjects, like Dutch and math.

Paid Help

Parents pay more often for homework help when their child is in secondary school. At primary school this is 14% of the parents, at secondary school 34% choose paid help. They pay on average €175 per month. They choose paid help because the child learns slower, must catch up or because the school offers not enough guidance. External help is easy to find and parents are very satisfied with the help they get. Parents who do not pay for help mainly say they do not need it. It is striking that one third of the parents with a child in secondary school do not use extra lessons because they find them too expensive.

Shared Responsibility

Parents think the responsibility for homework help lies both at school and with the parents. Two thirds of the parents who guide the child themselves are happy with this and think guiding at home belongs to it. One third of the parents provide homework help themselves because they think the school offers not enough guidance. Other common reasons for giving support themselves are because the child learns slower or to catch up. A large group of parents think their child gets not enough attention because the class is too full. This applies to half of the primary school parents and over one third of the parents with a child in secondary school. In addition, about one third says they think the school should offer more. At the same time, half of the parents understand that the teacher does not give this extra help. Parents have quite different opinions.

Landelijk Ouderpanel

In the Landelijk Ouderpanel parents can give their opinion about different topics around raising children and education. The Landelijk Ouderpanel is an initiative of Stichting Opvoeden.nl and Ouders & Onderwijs. 386 parents took part in this research. Read the full report. Do you want to take part? Sign up now via the link below!