Homework was one of the key touchstones in my experience of parenting two children through the school system. Each day they brought home a worksheet, book or practice paper. I would ask what they were working on, and we would talk about how they were finding it and if they needed any help. As they got older, they asked for my help less frequently, but it remained the moment where their school life and home life came together, and I was allowed a glimpse in. Home learning through Covid made this more of a collision than a coming together, but the less said about that the better. I was struck, then, when the data from the most recent Parent Voice Project showed that homework, this crucial moment of home-school engagement, is one of the most rapidly changing of all the measures we surveyed. Some 39 per cent of about 6,000 parents now say their child “regularly” or “occasionally” uses artificial intelligence (AI) for homework, up from 30 per cent last year, with the “never” group falling from 41 per cent to 35 per cent. The numbers among the middle classes are even higher, with nearly 50 per cent saying AI is being utilised. And if we are being honest, this is probably under-reporting the scale. What a challenge it presents to teachers. In focus groups with parents, this did not provoke the alarm you might expect. As one father put it: “People were probably having this exact same conversation when calculators came out.” Parents are aware that the world is changing, and AI is going to form a large part of that. But underneath that acceptance was a greater worry – not about AI itself, but about what was disappearing alongside it. Losing sight of the process Our polling has consistently shown that parental engagement with school is closely tied to how positively parents feel about their child’s education, and how well they feel schools communicate with them. Homework is a key opportunity to get that relationship right. But, while some parents remain closely involved, others have lost sight of the process altogether. As one mother admitted: “I don’t have a clue what homework he gets… School has never told me he hasn’t done it, so I’m hoping he has done it.” What upset me the most, listening to parents, was how differently they described the after-school routine now. Their children were less likely to sit at the kitchen table with a worksheet spread out in front of them. Instead, they disappeared off to their rooms to complete digital homework on laptops, or on the shared desktop in the corner. One mother described how her daughter’s homework had become invisible to her entirely: “Everything’s online… she’s never brought any homework home.” There was no book to glance at, no half-finished page to ask about, just a login somewhere else in the house. No wonder children are being tempted by the quick win of AI. Homework was never really about the worksheet. It was the conversation that came with it – the chance to ask what someone was struggling with, and to hear the answer. As homework becomes more digital, that chance is harder to come by, and it seems likely that some parents will lose it sooner than others. This is a fast-moving picture, and one the Parent Voice Project will keep tracking. But schools and families should not wait to find out how much of that daily engagement can survive the shift before asking how to protect it.