Maintain a satirical voice across two paragraphs

Write TWO paragraphs of a satirical article arguing that homework should be abolished. Your article must maintain a consistent voice throughout. You should plan the register and persona before writing.

[12 marks]

Indicative top-band response:

Why Homework Is Society's Greatest Unsolved Problem — and also the reason my kitchen table has been unusable since September

Every evening, at approximately 6pm, a ritual occurs in approximately eleven million British households. Textbooks are opened. Laptops are found, charged, lost, and refound. A parent, who has already worked a full day, is required to remember whether the Battle of Hastings was 1066 or 1067 (it was 1066; they were right; they were also told they were wrong, which is a separate issue). Homework, that gift from schools to families who were not already spending enough time together arguing, lands at the door with the punctuality of a pizza and the digestibility of one.

The research, for those who enjoy research, is unambiguous: beyond a modest threshold, homework does not improve attainment. It does, however, improve parental anxiety, sibling resentment, and the market for highlighter pens. One study found that homework accounts for approximately thirty per cent of after-school family conflict. The study did not investigate the remaining seventy per cent, which, I suspect, is also about homework.

Mark scheme cues:

• Satirical persona established by P1 and maintained through P2: B3.
• Register consistency (wry, formal-but-colloquial, parenthetical asides as running joke): B3.
• Sentence variety within voice (long accumulation + short punchline): B3.
• Tonal control — comic but purposeful: B3.