At Bellshill Academy, the problem is keeping them out. So popular is the Baffle (Bellshill Academy First For Learning and Enjoyment) Club, that the S1 and S2 pupils who return to school for homework are queuing up at the front door well before its opening time of 6.45pm. More than 400 pupils have taken part in the prize-winning venture since it began four years ago and one of the effects was that teachers were badgered for more homework, because only those with homework to do were allowed into the club, which devoted half its time to homework and half to a leisure activity.

Alan Clark, the school's deputy head, is delighted not just at the popularity of the club but at the new, positive relationship between the junior pupils and the seniors, who act as tutors - and by the ambition of the first and second years to become tutors in their turn. ''It will be very interesting to see if it makes a difference to the standard grade results this year, which will be the first external exams sat by people who have been through the club,'' he says. But the Baffle Club is clearly a very long way from the description of crammers for the state school system, which Education Secretary David Blunkett yesterday suggested homework clubs could become.

Ann Hill, chief executive of the Scottish School Board Association, is currently writing to parents at the school, where she is on the board, to explain the purpose of homework.

It is, according to Mrs Hill, ''a way of developing skills and providing opportunity for children to make decisions about what they are going to learn. It is training in planning

and organising their time and accepting responsibility and ownership of that time''.

Interestingly, that could be seen as being completely at odds with the prescription handed out yesterday by Blunkett for homework for pupils at state schools in England: 20 minutes a night for four and five-year-olds to 50 minutes at the end of primary school and between one-and-a-half and two-and-a-half hours for exam candidates in their last two years.

While championing regular homework, Hill points out that what one child will do in half an hour will take another one three hours, and says such times should be used only as a guide. ''I would not condemn Mr Blunkett's guidelines, but we do not want to have children sitting from 5pm to 11pm at the end of a day at school. At the same time, if they are enjoying doing a project at home, then let them carry on.''

That view is given a professional echo by Dr Peter Martin, head of the department of Education Studies at Strathclyde Univ-ersity, who says trying to define homework in terms of time is not helpful. Acknowledging that Scottish teachers really dislike anyone being prescriptive, he says: ''There is a lot of evidence that parents' involvement in the process of learning to read is beneficial to children.

''If the prescription will encourage schools to set up ways of helping parents to learn with children, well and good.

''Homework has declined for both good and bad reasons. It used to be that the gap between the more able and the less able was exaggerated by homework and children of reasonable ability with aspiring parents did more homework than the less able, but we should not pull down the top to

make for greater equality. Homework clubs which provide supervised support for children help to pull the bottom up,'' he says.

Although homework clubs do provide extra opportunities, he warns that a hidden danger is that responsibility for all learning is handed over to the school.

''Sometimes parents do not know how to help their child, but there is a need for parents to be involved to engender the right kind of attitude. It is particularly important in primary school because attitudes to learning are set by the time a child reaches secondary school,'' he says.

Homework has two main functions, according to Dr Martin. One is to get additional practice at tackling something already studied in class, which might be the case with maths, and the other is to mop up. ''If a pupil has somehow been left behind by a class pace which was too fast, homework provides an opportunity for catching up. There is an underestimation of the range of ability in every class, even where there is an ability grouping, and the need to individualise work is something teachers find incredibly difficult,'' he says.

Homework policy should be decided at school level to take different circumstances into account, according to the Educational Institute of Scotland. Deputy general secretary Fred Forrester points out that in some cases large amounts of homework can be overspill from ineffective work in the classroom.

''All pupils in the upper secondary need homework, but it will vary from subject to subject,'' he says.

The Scottish Education Department has no plans to stipulate hours which should be spent on homework, but 1994 guidelines say that each school should have a clear policy on homework with consistency in setting homework.