Despite a long history of government policies to achieve greater equity in education internationally, the links between social disadvantage, educational underachievement and social exclusion remain robust.  Over the past decade, in part as a response to the imperative to ‘raise standards’, and develop ‘quality learning outcomes’ western liberal democratic societies such as Britain, Scandinavia and Australia have added homework to the suite of education policies shaping school practice. Students in these countries consequently spend increasing amounts of time on homework, particularly in primary schools (Baker and LeTendre, 2005). Further, parental participation in homework in the UK, Australia, and more recently in Denmark, has been central to the ‘home-school partnership’ agenda, championed by governments as a cost-neutral mechanism for increasing academic outcomes. In Australia and in the UK, national guidelines have been introduced which foreground the centrality of parental involvement in homework and indeed the main aim of homework in the UK is to engage parents in their children’s learning (Hallam, 2009).  In Denmark, despite the absence of specific homework policies,  various national initiatives assume the educational value of homework, especially for underperforming students and  offer migrant  parents training in supporting their children’s homework (Kryger & Ravn, 2009). Similarly in Australia, homework policies discursively position parents as capable educational workers, despite research evidence that poor or culturally and linguistically diverse families may not have access to the sets of social and cultural capital required to fully engage with homework in the manner assumed in policy (Dooley, 2009; Hutchison, 2011). Parents are increasingly investing time and energy to support, manage and enhance their children’s education, an involvement often threaded with anxiety (Blackmore & Hutchison, 2010; Nelson, 2010; Reay, 2005) regarding their children’s futures, an anxiety which transcends boundaries of social class and culture.

As a socially located practice, homework raises significant tensions for educators concerned with social justice, since successful completion requires a range of inequitably distributed social and cultural capitals. Refugee and linguistic minority populations are aware of homework’s potential to provide opportunities for consolidating understandings and developing English language competence (Hutchison, 2011; Jeynes, 2007) , although very few studies have examined the effectiveness of parent involvement for students from various socio-economic and cultural backgrounds (Patall, et al. 2008). This paper explores interrelationships between families and education systems through an examination of the cultural meanings and impact of homework on children’s learner identities and family life in diverse sociocultural contexts. Contrary to dominant essentialising discourses, regarding the deficiencies of poor and ethnic minority parents in relation to their involvement in schooling, the analysis reveals that parents across classes and cultures prioritise investments in education systems. Drawing on Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, capital and field and Laureau’s notion of ‘concerted cultivation’ the paper explores the ‘family habitus’ and the learning dispositions formed through the interrelationships between the private domain of the family and the institutional habitus of the school in order to understand the ways in which homework produces educational advantage and disadvantage for particular groups of children.

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