Not used as anything more than a very preliminary guide by dd's school and very quickly superseded by their own tests and assessments. And they adjust the sets at the end of every year, so it's not like you're stuck forever with whatever you performed when you were 11.

We have only Maths so far.

We received the Maths results on Wednesday and the English on Friday still waiting for Science.

Did the SATS results get sent to schools on Friday?

Oh, and we set in English, Mathematics and MFL based on their performance in our entrance examination, so I suppose that is not a lot different from setting based on SATs.

The key difference is that we have a verbal and non-verbal reasoning tests in addition to Mathematics and English papers, and we don't have a Science paper.

Overall, our setting works really well. The only problem which arise are inevitably at the set boundaries (some children perform better at the top of the lower set where they can feel confident, and others perform better when they are pulled up by their classmates), but I suspect that this is the same for all schools and you can't really know what is the best until you have met the child.

Only a handful of our Year 7s have SATs, which we pretty much ignore. We do MidYIS testing at the earliest opportunity and use those scores to guide us on how they are achieving relative to their natural ability.

I don't really get targets based on NC levels. Their targets should be behavioural - and if they work towards their targets, they will reach their potential academically. By behavioural, I mean things like organisation, actively participating in lessons, answering in more detail, as well as self discipline.

When you think of a target, you have to translate it into something the child can do. Telling a child that their target in English is level 6b is meaningless without accompanying strategies and tactics.

Out of 3 high schools that our children go to, one uses the Maths SAT to set immediately and 2 use all the tests to set for everything. I don't know how flexible the sets are.

Our school use KS2 data extensively for target setting, because this is what school progress is measured against for CVA and FFT data and so on. Teachers are not allowed to amend targets once they have been set (in Sep/Oct).

But it can be very misleading, especially when you have students with unrealistically high SATs results or the other way round.

At my son's school it seems more common for targets to be adjusted.

If a secondary school set from day 1 they would use them as a guideline I would imagine. Dd2's school did. Dd1's didn't set until year 8.

this one or that one? <snigger>