SATS results not great

[JTTWC]

Hello all,

Please let me know if this is the incorrect place to post this.

Today my daughter came home from school with her mock SATS papers. She’s in year 2.

I knew she was struggling a bit with Maths although I thought she was doing ok with English.

She just about got a third of the questions right on most of the papers. Her spellings weren’t great at all. There was a spelling which she literally spelled out to me that morning and got it correct then but wrong on the test!

The teacher when we last spoke didn’t give any indication that she was struggling that much. I don’t know how much to expect from her. She is bright and has a good memory, but sometimes getting her to concentrate and engage her brain properly can be a struggle. It was silly little mistakes she had made which I’m sure if I was there overseeing her, telling her to double check she probably would have corrected!

This is the first ‘proper’ test she has done. I did quite well at school until it came to exams, I utterly crumbled and my brain turned to mush. They use to, even when I was younger, stress me out. I hoped she wouldn’t take after me, as taking tests are obviously important when you are at school.

Did anyone have anything similar happen to their child? Im not sure if I’m over worrying. She has missed so much school, although I did try my best to home school.

Please don't worry about them. They are more for the school in my experience. As long as she enjoys school and is learning, it's enough

See if you can set up another chat with the teacher? Ask what you can do and what the school can do. School is probably using this to identify where they need to focus, not just over the next few months but all the way to Y6.

Also agree with BuggerOrfDeary. There are less stressful ways of assessing, especially at such a young age.

Thanks @BuggerOrfDeary. She does enjoy school and normally comes home telling me she got a lot of her answers right on the work she done at school that day. I just don’t want her to stress about them. Like I said they use to make me a nervous wreck!

@BlueChampagne I agree and thanks for the reply. I am aiming to work with her and see where she is early next year, also see if the school can offer any work sheets to do at home. I was trying not to worry, as this is the first test she has done.

@BuggerOrfDeary

Please don't worry about them. They are more for the school in my experience. As long as she enjoys school and is learning, it's enough

This is true. They are to assess the school and create league tables. (ex teacher here)

Please don't let your child get worried about this. It's wrong, imo, that the school is even doing mock SATs in Yr 2.

The reason why they are doing these tests so early on in the year is because it will be a baseline assessment. Therefore they will be testing her on things that she hasn't been taught yet, so see her starting point. It's all about monitoring effective teaching and the curriculum today. By the time that she does her actual says at the end of year 2, she will almost certainly be getting much higher scores. If there was a real problem with her, I'm sure that you would have been informed by now. I remember sitting A level standard mocks in the lower sixth and getting D's. This was years and years ago. I was told that that was where they expected us all to be knowledge wise towards the start of our A-levels. By the time I sat my A levels I got a mix of A's and B's (this was before A*s came in).

@Hugoslavia a baseline, as you describe, is fine, as there are still 6 months of teaching and learning before May but why give out the results and call them Mocks? That seems like deliberately ramping up the pressure on 6 and 7 year olds.

Thank you all for your replies. Reading your replies has put my mind at ease. I will continue to work with her. Even over the past few days her reading has really come on so well. It does seem a bit young to be putting pressure of exams on them. I think the teacher would have gone through the mocks with them, but I still imagine my daughter would have sat there and thought what the hell is this

OP, in kindness, I think because of your own experiences you're over-investing in this, and worrying whether she's inherited your difficulties whereas tbh I think not only is getting many answers wrong 'fine', it's also rational.

Careless mistakes on a very boring worksheet suggests that your DD is (1) normal and (2) discerning enough to not stress herself about minutiae which - very justifiably - isn't important to her (which is why, without being prompted, she probably didn't double check her work).

My DC1 is intelligent but also has spent too much of his school career to date being compared, comparing himself, and being found wanting. He was slow out of the starting blocks for both reading and writing, but he's more than caught up on the reading front by now (without any pressure from me or school) and I have every faith that he will do the same with his writing.

I regret buying into any target-setting or comparing-with-peers over the years. I regret worrying whether he was doing all right, and whether I needed to support him to do more. The message to the child from all that is "you're not yet good enough". When actually, he was good enough all along. When schools closed last year and he had no reason other than his own curiosity to learn and apply himself, he learned so much more and worked with greater intent and more happily than he had ever done before. I wish I'd just relaxed and ignored the culture of 'constructive' criticism.

I always enjoyed exams - they're a natural strength of mine. Like spelling. Whilst some of that has given me certain confidence and an advantage within the education system, which translates to some useful bits of paper for the real world, they're actually pretty useless skills in life. I actually don't think taking tests really is an important part of school, beyond being emotionally resilient to them and able to put them into proportion (ie SATs should feel irrelevant to children - A levels, not so much, but even these are not the end of the world).

I'm a year 2 teacher.
Setting these tests in the autumn term is a strange choice as we haven't even completed a third of the curriculum. Its even more bizarre to share these scores with the children or parents.
Much better ways to baseline assess the children.

These sats are a way of assessing schools and mean nothing for individual children.

Getting a third of questions right is good and being easily distracted and making silly mistakes is completely age appropriate. Shes still very young.
This year group havent had a full year at school since they started reception.