Our eldest child is in her first year of secondary school and, for us as parents, one of the biggest adjustments has been over homework, as a couple of your previous columns have touched on. Our daughter generally copes well with homework, but the quantity she gets varies enormously from day to day, and from week to week. We can see no pattern and would simply like to understand better why this happens and how to avoid periods of great stress for her. Teacher Adam Conway replies: The key point you make is that your daughter has, most of the time, adapted well to the new pattern of homework at secondary school. It appears from your comments that you parents are having more difficulties, but you imply that it isn't always easy for your daughter and many students do struggle to cope when several days pass with very little homework to complete, followed by a frantic period trying to finish several major assignments. It won't reassure you to know that in most cases the individual teachers are oblivious to this problem - especially when the homework they have set coincides with other teachers' homework. You can check the school's view on this (and no school should accept this kind of problem as unavoidable) by finding a copy of its official policy document on homework and by contacting the teacher with responsibility for the social welfare of your daughter's class. That teacher can have an overview across the several subjects she is taught and can contact all her teachers to get a clearer picture at any particular time. Although a school should seek to organise and run a homework system that runs with steady consistency, there are factors that make it very difficult to avoid all of the issues you outline. One international school's principal recently consulted all of the 25-plus subject departments on exactly what their ideal homework requirements were. This approach had the huge benefit of starting from what teachers actually set for homework, rather than trying to impose some system thought up on high. Perhaps not surprisingly, what emerged was an extremely wide range of types of homework tasks - varied in their nature, frequency and likely time needed to complete them. Subjects as individual as maths and music or art and Putonghua, are never going to be able to set identical homework assignments. One subject expects students to complete daily learning through twenty or thirty minutes of unavoidably mechanical revision and exercises, whilst another subject, once or twice a year, requires 20 hours or more to be spent on a single project spread out over only a few weeks. The consultation presented the school leadership with a thorny problem. How can a school improve its students' homework situation without strangling the unique characteristics of each subject? After all, one reason why students enjoy school and achieve outstanding success is the appeal of individual and excitingly differing learning across subjects. And no parents want their child to experience school as bland and homogenous.