How does a secondary school deal with an incoming y7 who hasnt done sats?

I wouldn't worry about the whole sets problem. Most teachers are pretty good at assessing from a child's work and involvement in class which one they should be in. I don't know where you are, but not all secondary schools have ability-streamed sets in y7.

In terms of homeschooling, I know a few kids who were home-schooled up to 6th form, and they had no problems either socially or academically, then went on to get into very good universities. There's a huge homeschooling community in North America, with loads of resources and forums for advice and support that you could tap into as well.

I couldn't agree with you more that kids are tested far too much and too early here in the UK. Better to let them learn through play and experiences rather than rote learning for exams!

I took my DD out in Y6 and homeschooled her. Fast forward to Y7 in secondary and it hasn't been a problem at all - they wrote to her primary school and asked what her predicted SATs grades would've been and they made a best guess as to what sets to put her in at the start. Some sets were wroong but within a term she'd been moved up/down where appropriate and it was no big deal. Her target grades have been a bit odd - the school said that as they had no SATs to go on they automatically put her end of year target grades at the lowest possible. But that hasn't been a problem either as she's felt good about herself when she's easily passed those targets.

In summary, your DD will be fine as long as you pick a secondary where they regularly asses sets and children get moved as and when appropriate.

Have you talked to her teacher about how she is feeling and especially the boredom / stress? I would start there, especially as the teacher is doing it for the first time.

Combining he 5 and 6 sounds disastrous from the pov of subjecting the Yr 5s to SATS twice!

I don't get that hysteria at our school at all Windowdonkey,

They (staff) say they will simply use the levels until a new system is introduced. Changes to he curriculum are normal, people just get on with it. The basics are still the same (focus on literacy and maths, for example)

It will all work out I am sure.

My primary. There will be some kind of exams but not the current Sats. The year 5s and below are on the new national curriculum, so past Sats papers will not be relevent as they have been written for the old curriculum. Given that there is no nationally agreed levelling system to replace the old levels, and schools seem to be doing there own thing, Im not sure that secondary schools will get much useful information from primaries in the future. If the children are coming from a variety of feeder schools, all using different grading schemes it is going to be very complicated trying to compare them.

The current year 6 are the final year taking SATS as they exist at present. If your DC is a year 5 she won't be sitting them anyway. No one at my school seems to know what they will be replaced by yet. The advantage of having a year 5 is that they will at least be spared the mass of past papers that the year 6s usually have to do, as there won't be any.

I have a DD in Yr11 who has no SATS results - her school was part of a boycott that year. She was the only pupil from her primary to join her secondary school. Schools in the new area did not take part in the boycott.

Yrs 7, 8 & 9 passed without any significant issues. However, late in Yr10 I asked why her GCSE targets were mostly Bs when she was already achieving higher results in some subjects. It turned out that it was because she had no SATS results - she had been given 'B' as a target across the board. I did not realise that this was important until other pupils with higher targets were given extra support and opportunity to repeat coursework or controlled assessments because they had not reached their targets.

In short, her lack of SATS results has held her back. It would be nice to think is unusual but the way in which schools use data is not very transparent. It took ages to get to the bottom of the problem and we have had many meetings to get things changed.

In Y7 here SATS results were used to make the maths sets they went in in the first week and they were also used to make the official targets for all the subjects.

"it does depress me that primaries are indeed turning into factories where we churn out kids able to sit tests but who dont actually LEARN anything"

And high schools are GCSE factories. At a year 10 parents evening last week of the the SLT gave a presentation about how to revise. He said that he doesn't like the system being so geared to pass exams rather than actually learn a subject, but he can't do anything about it.

It clearly varies from school to school. I know that my dd's school talk to the y6 teacher of every new y7 over June/July/Aug, so even if they don't have official SATS results sent over, they do have every child's levels.

dh is secondary school teacher. He says that they don't get the SATs results until well into the Christmas term, way too late for them to be of any use, hence CAT tests are taken in the first week of Y7 and the results of these tests are used for setting.

I just went and looked at some of dd's exercise books - they have a sticker on the front with y6 level, y7 target levels (with space for revision), and autumn, spring and summer term progress levels. Some of the teachers have written in y7 targets, although these clearly aren't 'official' as they're not on the system that produces the report, and one teacher has written in a y6 level, similar to Flug's experience!

Having an older daughter at the school, who didn't start until y9 (with no previous levels), I'm not concerned about the school not supporting/encouraging dd3. Although dd2 found it highly annoying to have C/B targets for her GCSEs (seemingly plucked out of the ether, I never found out where they came from), her teachers were all clear that they expected more.

I have to say that the two grammar schools of which I have experience clearly totally disregard ks2 results.

Oooh my children are small but I've floated the idea of homeschooling yr 6 (and maybe yr5) as so much is geared to SATS. I love the idea of homeschooling but my daughter loves her infant school. I want her to do secondary/GCSEs etc and I think a few years in the middle would be brilliant to explore other things.

I've wondered about targets etc, but the fact its all so target driven is one of the reasons I flirt with homeschooling!

Dd3 in y7 with no SATS. Despite a long phone conversation with the transition officer before she started, they put her in what I am assuming by the size of it, was the bottom set for maths - swiftly tested and moved into top set as the teacher knows her older sister! - and I still have no idea which set she's in for English, although she says people get a wide range of levels for bits of work. She did do CATS at school in Oct/Nov. Just had her second progress report and she still has no end of y7 or end of y9 target levels.

I don't think this situation is ideal (she finds it odd that she hasn't got any targets when everyone else has), but i don't think it's actually affecting her education.

The schools near us told us that they don't use KS2 SAT results for setting. They re-test, then set in second half of first term (or even y8). So I don't think it matters if you homeschool then move to secondary at Y7.

But - If the testing is causing the stress, is avoiding it in Y6 the best thing? Could the stress / boredom be tackled in a different way? Tests are a pretty dominant feature now of secondary, further and higher education - just wondering if it would be better to try and find techniques to help her with the stresses of testing during the SATs (given results are ultimately irrelevant to her schooling future) than to pull her out of school and avoid the stress. I am not convinced that we do our children any favours by helping them avoid stresses (as opposed to supporting them in dealing with the stresses. (This article maybe of interest - www.heysigmund.com/anxiety-in-kids/ )

The boredom thing is another issue...but I would speak to the school about that as well - DD has been put into extension classes in yr 6 and has done some really interesting other stuff so not just all about SATs

Ditto, especially for oversubscribed schools.

I was going to say the same as cece. The secondary schools in our area have feeder schools as the main criteria.

you might also want to look at the admission criteria for your chosen secondary school as some primary school s get priority on the admission criteria.

Now in y9 ... FFS I must start previewing