- Mansfield Woodhouse, Nottinghamshire
- 11 to 18
- 1300 students
Fixing homework
If you’d seen my homework routines before, you’d have been horrified. There’s no wonder the students weren’t fully completing it, because they knew it wasn’t going to be checked thoroughly, or they’d just open their books, and we’d go around and make 2 or 3 SPaG corrections, and that would be it. I never really had a handle on it.
Now, setting homework is my Sunday afternoon task, and it takes me 15 minutes, if that. I set it for all year groups, which reduces staff workload, and then staff are responsible for going through, checking it’s been done, and analysing the data for their classes. It’s just a click of a button, and any member of staff can see the entire year group and the uptake of homework. And now that the students know how easily we can monitor it, the uptake is so much better. I think they like that homework is consistent now.
Unique and thoughtful English content
I was surprised by how effective I found the language content. Initially, I thought that literature would work well, as it’s all quiz-based and there’s lots of knowledge to cover, whereas language is more of a skill. But actually, it was more about the assessment objectives, and it surprised me how useful it’s been. Because really, is that something that we go over often enough? That’s ultimately what they’re being tested on.
And for the reading sections, I like that they get an extract to go with the questions, and that they’re quite difficult. The kids are finding them challenging, and that’s what they need, because that’s what they’re going to get in the exam.
I like how it’s broken down into language, skills, and literature and rated by difficulty level. It’s been so easy to map alongside our long-term plans.
Powerful data for spotting knowledge gaps
Sometimes when you take traditional homework in from students, it’s difficult to gauge whether anyone’s helped them or whether AI has written it for them, so we just wanted to know, “What do they actually know?” And that’s what Educake has given us.
What I’ve found really useful is that you can pinpoint the gaps in knowledge. You can tailor homework to any sort of misconceptions that you need to challenge on a whole-school level, a year-group level, or even down to individuals. It’s very student-friendly in terms of academic and special education needs. It’s just phenomenal.
The most useful feature is being able to see the scale of the entire year group. You can even pinpoint the gaps between year 7 to year 8 to year 9. So maybe there’s something that our current year 9 were missing when they were younger—we can see whether our year 7s have got a better grasp of it or if those same misconceptions are still happening. Having that data at our fingertips is fantastic. I absolutely love it.
A final word to English teachers
It’s a phenomenal timesaver. Genuinely, you will be given the gift of time. I would tell another English teacher who hasn’t tried Educake not to snub. I used to get the purple envelopes all the time, and I would eat the CurlyWurly or the Freddo and assume, “Well, it’s just a package. They won’t know the way that Manor Academy does homework.” But they absolutely do.
