Protest against SATS?

What will you do if she feels stressed about taking year 7 exams?

It's the reaction to the exams that is the issue, rather than the exams themselves. So if you want what is best for her you won't make a fuss about the tests, you'll help her to cope with them and help her to realise they're no big deal.Then, when she gets to secondary school, she will cope with exams much better.

The whole point of exams is to see how children stack up and are doing. What next.. protest A levels or GCSEs? We can’t all win everything. Tell them to do their best and it’s hardly the end of the world if they don’t do great on SATs anyway. Good practice for the GCSE process years later.

I'm so glad to see that there are more posters challenging some of the misinformation being posted and sharing the accurate information about SATs and why they matter for the child.

If a child is showing signs of being stressed then, by all means, speak with the teacher and see what can be done to help. I will say that feeling a little stress at this point is actually normal and, in small doses, desireable. It shows that the child understands that the exams matter and are motivated to do their best. If it's beyond that then it does need addressing.

However, a couple of points:

• parents do not have the right to withdraw their child from national exams. The headteacher has that option and may agree but, if they don't, the child will be sitting the exams if they are physically in the building during the two week window,
• sending your child to secondary school with no official data makes them, progress data-wise, irrelevant. There can be significant knock-on implications of this.

Unfortunately she may need to sit them when she returns and will be kept away from her friends who by that time might be doing the fun year 6 stuff which she will miss until she has completed all the tests she has missed.

Can you ask about her sitting them in a smaller room if she is very stressed about it.

Is it also your decision whether or not she does her GCSEs? Because teaching her she can opt out of mandatory tests because mummy says she can is going to royally screw her over in the future.

But what are you giving them a heads up about?! At no point have you actually said what you're planning to do!

Sometimes children have to do things that are stressful and things they don't want to do. All through secondary they will be tested so let her get used to the system now. You cant pull her out in every year group when they get stressed because they have a stress.... and especially not for GCSEs's.

A heads up about what?
Are you being deliberately obtuse?

Exactly the same. I think they just put unnecessary pressure on young kids, and some never quite caught up after missing so much through COVID.
Her mental health is so much more important than a SATs score.

What's the relevance of talking to the teacher about that?!

What would be the purpose of writing to the school, out of interest? The school have to enter children into the SATs; they can't just opt out. I promise you, the Head and Year 6 teachers are stressed about it too!

I think unfortunately sats are needed. As certainly at dc school without it they do not push kids at all. Even with it as a target they helped some kids more than others , focussing on the ones getting exceeding. Plus they were wrong completely with their predicted score. In terms of english dc got 113 at 7 on ks1 but only just got 110 at ks2 as she works slowly and it was a very tricky test.
Re setting at secondary dc moved up missing the data and moved up sets when they received the resukts. Possibly dc would have moved up anyway but not so many sets.

Anyway secondary as you will know if you have older dc is fullllll of tests. Dc1 is having one for maths/sci/geo/history/mfl every term so maybe 36 tests a year!

Seems to me that protesting it, removing her from them etc makes them a much bigger deal than just encouraging her to try her best but emphasising that this is all that’s expected of her. People don’t generally protest about things which aren’t particularly significant - so if you do, you’re the one making them out to be really important.

Experiencing some stress is good for children. It’s part of life. Think of it as like a vaccine - a small amount of stress now, prepares them to respond better to stress in the future.

I agree with this. I'm in my sixties and when I was at infant and junior school we took formal tests twice every year. When it came to the 11 plus, no-one was bothered by it because it was just another test. It prepared us well for secondary school where again we were tested twice each year in every subject.

Not never moved, that would indeed be daft. But if they're in a set for several subjects it takes time to get data from each of them, often relies on teachers coming to me to say 'hey, they'd do better at a faster/slower pace' and then I have to find space for that to happen. I'll look at data myself but that's half a term/a term where they've been in the wrong set for them. It's doable if it's only a few kids (like in your examples) but if there are lots without previous data it gets tricky to move lots of students around and then parents and students complain there's a lack of consistency. It's not laziness, its logistically challenging and does happen but more slowly than is helpful for the students compared to if they were in the right set in the first place.

So why are you going to speak to the teacher then?

This.
That's what I told my own daughter. That's what I tell the kids I teach.
The bigger a thing made of it, the bigger a thing it gets.