To give DD school (and the SATs agency) some basic statistical literacy?

Trouble is that a 'simple link' is not accessible to all parents, whether for reasons of literacy, language or numeracy; you'd still have some asking 'but what does this mean?'. It's difficult to find a way of conveying the information without at least some people becoming confused, upset or offended.

If you pick a shorthand of High, Mid, Low, people get upset. If you use the attempt at neutrality of met the expected standard/working towards the standard/exceeded the standard, people get upset, if you link to a document containing words or explanations that they don't understand, people get upset, if you reduce it to 'she's at the level we expected for her, everything is fine, she hasn't fallen back', people get upset. We have posts this week from people upset that school reports have mentioned areas children find difficult because reports should be hagiographies and others upset that there isn't any actual indication of the level/progress their children are at because it's all generic phrases that sound nice but mean nothing.

There is no way for schools to win with communications reporting on assessment and progress; you just can't please all of the people all of the time.

Focus on educating the school

rather than trying to improve your daughter’s educational attainment

Go for it op
drop the head teacher an email

I dare you! 😊

What is it that you meed to know, precisely?

Do you need to know exactly where in the centiles she lay? For what purpose? You know she’s below c.75% of her peers because she’s below 100, and she’s a distance off (as the peak of the distribution will fall above 100, the distribution graph will be rising above her scores and falling below them).

Are you worried about eg setting in her secondary? Do they set on the basis of SATs? As a non-grammar in a grammar county, the highest attainers will not be in her school, so she will be closer to ‘the middle’ of her school’s ability range than she would be in a full comprehensive in a non-selective county.

I have already posted about how her trajectory may well be seen by her secondary. One real advantage for her and for you is that she has a genuine opportunity to ‘beat her predictions’ and reap the self-esteem that comes from that.

Also, the narrow range of subjects vs secondary could hide her strengths - art, drama, sport, music, DT etc etc are all utterly unlinked to her SATs, as is ‘being a genuinely nice person who tries her best and everyone likes’.

Your school is thoroughly confused about how the scores word. Neither median nor mean are relevant. 100 represents the threshold for having met the expected standard - it's the pass mark.

The STA sets out here how the scoring system works.

75% reached expected standard in reading
73% reached expected standard in grammar
74% reached expected standard in maths
62% reached expected standard in all 3

Yes it does, that's literally what the statements are.

More important than her results though is why does that even matter? Do you compare her to other children? Do you let her know thats what you do?

Quite!!!

Having taught hundreds of y6 children, I can assure you that children getting 85 and 115 are very very different. A child scoring 85 will be struggling with maths. A child scoring 115 will be extremely good at maths. A child scoring 85 one day will not just happen to score 115 the next and vice versa (bad days and extremely lucky guesses aside!) Whereas, a child scoring 99 and one scoring 101 may well be indistinguishable.

given the lowest possible score is 80 and the highest 120 how can 85 and 115 be ‘statistically indistinguishable’?!

also, SATS scores are not age standardised, as someone else above seems to think they are.

This is all you need to look at

What's the score range of the SATs?

Here's a breakdown of the score ranges and what they mean:

120 – This is the highest score available in the KS2 SATs

110-119 – Any score above 110 (including 120) means that a child has exceeded the expected standard in the test and is working at greater depth.

100 – This is the expected standard for children. It basically means they are working at an age-related expectation.

80-99 – Any child awarded a scaled score of 99 or below has not met the expected standard in their SATs. Often, schools refer to these children as ‘working towards the expected standard’.

80 – The lowest scaled score that can be given

Dfe don’t release the distribution.

FFT data lab do some sampling most years.

cumulative frequencies for some years are in with this article.

https://ffteducationdatalab.org.uk/2022/07/key-stage-2-2022-how-have-things-changed-since-2019/

This tells you her raw scores. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/key-stage-2-tests-2025-scaled-scores/2025-key-stage-2-scaled-score-conversion-tables

Based on the scales scores you gave
Grammar - scaled score of 89 was 13 or 14 marks out of a possible 70.
English (reading) - scaled score of 93 was 18 marks out of a possible 50
Maths - scaled score of 94 was 34,35,36 or 37 marks out of a possible 110

To get the expected standard children needed
Grammar - at least 35/70
English Reading - at least 28/50
Maths - at least 58/110

We don’t know what the school said. How do we know they didn’t perfectly explain the statistics? They most likely have nothing else to do at the end of a school term than explaining statistics to parents…

You are going to look like a massive twat if you try to give the school and the DfE some 'basic statistical literacy' based on your fundamental misunderstanding of how the sats scores work.

The school wasn’t communicating as a statistician. It was communicating in lay terms to parents who need to understand how their child is doing in school compared to how they should be performing at the end of KS2, and compared to their class peers.
It’s to help focus attention and resources on each child in the most effective way going into KS3.

OP your time might be better spent looking to be kind to others rather than criticising them over their statistical knowledge, especially as yours doesn’t seem that impressive.
Teachers have a really hard job. I’m a TA, the pupils I work with scream, shout, threaten to punch me, try and punch/hit me, overturn furniture, it’s really hard.
I find it a bit petty that you are blaming the school for something the government do and criticising them because your statistical knowledge is oh so much better…

Why don’t leave the school alone, think of something positive to thank them for and move on, focusing instead on your daughter and all she has achieved despite her challenges. It will be much better for your mental health.

So she could have just posted "how are SATS scores calculated" instead of the arrogant post she did put up

To be fair, the school’s communication was poor. Had they simply given a link to how the scores are calculated, OP would not have been misled.

You have made yourself sound like a bit of a dick here because you don't understand the scores for SATS. Certainly go ahead and lecture others about your superior knowledge, let us know how that goes though.

I think that the description of your DD and her work very much matches the narrative description given for her scores - she is ‘working towards the expected standard’.

The scores that will be important for secondary are the English Reading and the Maths, as they are used to calculate ‘Progress 8’ after GCSEs, the measure of how she does against others with the same starting point nationally.

With 93/94 and a background of support within a smaller group to help her to make better progress, her secondary (if state) will see her as someone within reach of expected standards in key GCSEs when the time comes and (if resources allow by that point) she may well be a candidate for additional boosting. If they can get her to good passes in GCSEs, she will greatly boost their progress scores, whereas had she just scraped 100 that progress might not look as good.

I know from previous posts you are a hugely involved and active parent so in many ways she is ideally set up for the next step.

As one of those 'so called data managers', it often rankles to have teachers lecturing me on algorithms developed on the basis of many thousands of children's data over many years as though it's something I've decided to tosh into SIMS for shits and giggles. I know the limitations, I know that a cohort of 60 from an extremely deprived neighbourhood where half hadn't encountered English three years ago isn't going to exactly replicate the expected outcomes arrived at from around 750,000 separate data points collected every year.

I also know that it makes absolutely zero difference to the DfE that Mrs Curly haranguing me is ruining my day, we will be judged on the basis of progress made in relation to the average score of Maths and Reading as measured at the end of KS2. Unfortunately, Mrs Curly doesn't seem to see beyond criticising the data being turned into graphs and charts and her thoughts upon her own numeracy skills to appreciate that fact when, quite frankly, I'm more concerned with doing my job and not appeasing people who don't like what the data says about their class compared to other teachers'.