To rip up SATS results without looking at them

[Mangetoutrodney]

School have said that DD might not pass her SATS as she is below the expected level. She’s not that confident anyway & I don’t think knowing that she had ‘failed’ them would help her.
Aibu to not even look at the results - to rip them up without looking at them so none of us know them. I kind of feel like I want to protect her & build up her confidence in other ways.
Apparently secondary school re test anyway so do i need to know them?

[MsJudgemental]

@mangetoutrodney

When was that? What was your maths A level result? Did you get extra support? Well done on your 2:1.

My DH is a senior lecturer in psychology and DS is in his first year of computer science, both at a Russell Group university. To study STEM subjects at a RG university you need A/A* in maths at A level. To do an A level in maths you would usually need a level 6/7 at GCSE. To achieve that you need to do higher level maths, as the maximum you can achieve at foundation level is, as you said, level 4/5 or the old C. Foundation level does not cover the whole curriculum necessary to progress to a high level in maths-based subjects.

If a child does not achieve the expected level in maths in KS2 they have a lot of catching up to do. This means they will be getting support in the bottom groups. The risk is, as they are working at a lower level than their peers, they will have difficulty in covering the necessary curriculum by the end of KS3 to progress to higher maths.

As a private tutor, I find that this can disproportionately affect those with dyslexia, who can also underachieve in English SATs, as they often struggle with study skills and can have difficulty in even reading the questions without support; teachers simply don’t have time to do this.

Poor SATs results don’t mean that the child will never succeed academically, but it is disingenuous to tell people that they don’t matter in the current system.

[Jinxed2]

As others have said, the results are used for secondary school setting and targets so there’s no getting away from it really. If she’s only a couple of marks off get some practice in at home x

[bookmum08]

One thing I am curious about with the whole using the sats score to predict gcse grades is that sats is only maths and english. How can scores from those predict if a child will be any good at Drama, Art, Biology, History, French, Food Tech, Design and Technology, German, Textiles, etc etc etc.

[Malbecfan]

OP, whatever result your DD gets, tell her how proud you are of her, and certainly don't rip them up.

I'm a secondary school teacher in a non-SATs subject and it pisses me off no end to be told that because little Freddie got (old money) level 6 in English & Maths, his GCSE target should be a 7/A, even though in my subject, you have to have certain practical skills which are not measured by SATs.

When my own kids were in y6, DD1 was not allowed to sit the level 6 paper despite always working with the year above in Maths. She got level 5a, which was the highest she could attain. On week 1 at secondary school, her level in Maths was given as 7b. Yes, she had gone up almost 2 NC levels in half a term and a 6 week holiday . From then on, I knew they were bollocks. When DD2 was taking them, the primary school had pissed me off, so I pulled her out in a fit of pique and said I'd home-ed her for the last 2 months, missing SATs. As one of 2 in year 6, that would have a catastrophic result on their scores as the other child, although sweet and nice was not very strong academically. They begged and pleaded with me to send her in; in the end DD asked to go back and take them because they had a picnic on the final day and she wanted to be there for that.

[Malbecfan]

@Bookmum, welcome to my world! Any subject which needs an element of other skills such as drama, art, dance, PE or music is still subject to the same nonsense because the Fisher Family Trust fails to recognise this. My current Head is more receptive to this, but we are still held to y6 SATs-generated target grades.

Imagine a brilliant kid who cannot sing and has no arms to be able to play an instrument (far-fetched I hope but for illustrative purposes). How the hell can they get a grade 7/8 in GCSE Music where 30% of the exam is performance?

[bookmum08]

Malbecfan it really does sound a daft system.
My daughter is off to Secondary next year and where I am you have a lot of children who have been at private primary schools - where they don't do the sats - going into the state schools for secondary. I really genuinely can't understand the claims that SAT results are so important and are used to predict gcse grades because so many children (ie privately educated) don't actually take them.

[cantkeepawayforever]

Bookmum, as explained above, the privately educated children won't count in one of the key school accountability measures - Progress8.

As a result, having 'properly stretching' targets for them doesn't really matter from the school's point of view, as long as their 'raw results' will look OK.

So a privately educated child getting, say, 6s or 7s may be absolutely fine from the school's point of view, as they will count positively in their ' Got good GCSEs including English and Maths' stats. However, a child of the same 'basic ability' with very high SATs results from primary may be given targets of 8s, and receive lots of extra support should they be falling below them.

Of course in most cases it won't make a difference to the actual results obtained - the privately educated child will be given appropriate targets based on in-school testing, and will be taught well, and will attain those targets. This will be particularly the case because schools with many privately-educated pupils will often be desirable selective schools (in such schools, a quarter or more of pupils may come from the private sector at 11) and those schools will by definition tend to have high raw results for all.

It's just that, at the margins, a school with necessarily limited resources in terms of time, teachers and money, may well provide that slight extra push to those children who will make the most difference to their particular accountability measures, and that may slightly disadvantage those children who are underperforming at secondary for whatever reason, but where this has no baseline to be tracked against.

[Bluntness100]

How much of a battering will her self esteem take if she thinks her mum ripped her results up because they were so bad. Because that's what she's going to think. And he has a right to know. She's a person in her own right, and she's going to feel awful when all her school mates are discussing them.

Tell her thr results but contextualise them and tellher that you are proud of her, ripping them up is just too damaging,

[cantkeepawayforever]

Sorry, also meant to say: schools will, of course, generate targets for privately-educated pupils, using e.g. in-school testing as well as the basic information about socio-economic background etc always used by FFT.

I suspect that, as the algorithm won't be as standardised as when SATs are used (where there is whole population data for years to refine the algorithm - though of course that doesn't make the predictions any more accurate at individual level, where individual pupils are affected by all sorts of different factors that the algorithm can't take into account) it won't be quite as robust / reproducible, and as I say, won't pick up children who under-perform initially after transferring to secondary.

[AllPizzasGreatAndSmall]

Your daughter got a scaled score of 99, which means she scored 1-4 marks less than the amount needed to meet expected level, several weeks before the actual tests, so she is not working much below expected standard.
There's every chance that over the next few weeks of practice/revision lessons she will improve on her ability to answer questions, or even on the day not make simple errors, so that she may reach expected standard anyway.
If she is a similar level in English, surely it is better to look at the results with her and, even if she is still just below, put her score into context.

[EvaHarknessRose]

I am so pleased by how well you approached your tests
SATs are about schools, not you
You have got a very solid good set of results
I hated tests at school and never did amazingly well but i did well in xyz
I want to take you out to show you how proud we are of your hard work

Package it positively, the results sound fine to me.

But if you think there might be any specific issues, try to drill down into them soon (not now) as imho eye problems/dyslexia/cognitive issues are chronically under diagnosed in schools and even helping your dd know her preferred learning styles might help her confidence - she might have not had a learning style compatible with her teacher.

[motherofdxughters]

Truly terrible idea. You cannot protect your DC from failure, it is integral for them to experience it and build from it.

[Kolo]

Poor SATs results don’t mean that the child will never succeed academically, but it is disingenuous to tell people that they don’t matter in the current system.

What difference will it make whether a child (or parent) knows the results? What difference will it make if a child doesn’t even sit the SATs exam? A lower SATs result might indicate that a child is statistically less likely to achieve at GCSE (and GCSE maths result is even less reliable at indicating performance at Alevel, although I do agree that without studying the higher syllabus at gcse, a student is extremely unlikely to pass ALevel and we’d have discouraged them strongly from taking it).

People seem to be getting SATs as a measure of attainment in year 6 confused with a contributing factor to GCSE performance. There is a positive correlation between SATs and GCSE results over a cohort, but the act of measuring in year 6 does not affect future performance.

On an individual level, SATs are not a great indicator of a future GCSE performance. FFT take other factors into account (like socioeconomic markets) in order to make a prediction. And when they do make an individual prediction, it’s across a band of 3 or 4 grades, with the ‘most likely’ generally taken by schools as a minimum target.

SATs do matter to schools. That’s why children today spend so much of their curriculum time being taught to test and being prepped for that test. The school’s ofsted grading depends on the majority of students hitting or exceeding their targets. And it definitely factors into strategic management of resources to maximise ‘school performance’. But, despite this, I absolutely maintain that whether or not OP opens the results, or shares them with her child, it will have no effect on her child’s progress in secondary school. Actually, I think the reverse might be true in some cases. I think it’s very detrimental for the government (or schools) to tell children they are ‘failing’ at age 11. That’s just adding to the sort of crisis of confidence I’d have to spend years trying to correct.

[Kolo]

You cannot protect your DC from failure, it is integral for them to experience it and build from it.

Failure is a very important step in learning, I agree. My role as a teacher, and now as a parent, is to support children in managing those failures, learning from them and moving forward. That’s not what a SAT result is, though. Labelling a child as a failure in maths at 11years old is not supporting them in managing failures and can cause disengagement and affect future progress. I posted earlier that it could be beneficial to share an analysis of the SATs paper with OPs daughter to identify real areas that could be worked on.

[Kolo]

I’ve got a real bee in my bonnet about SATs, which might be evident in my posts

The fact is that educationalists have advised the gvt that SATs are at best useless and at worst detrimental to the education and MH of our children.

[Thatsashame]

Read them. Recognise the areas she needs hell with and support her in those.... geez. Why would you throw them away support your daughter

[cantkeepawayforever]

I posted earlier that it could be beneficial to share an analysis of the SATs paper with OPs daughter to identify real areas that could be worked on.

Absolutely. Either the teacher, or the OP, could easily sit down with the 'mock' papers and say 'look, you did really well and tried really hard. i wonder if there's anything that we could work on together that might help? Oh look, there were two questions here where you didn't put the decimal point in the answer even though you worked it out perfectly. Can you think of a way that you can always remember the decimal point? Or a slightly different order of setting out the problem so you can't forget it [I teach children to put in the decimal point while setting out e.g. a formal written addition, before starting to calculate, for example]. Oooh, what else? Missing digits - oh, those are hard but fun, they're like a puzzle. They get a lot easier with practice - let's try this online game to help... ' and so on and so on.

[MillicentMartha]

Interestingly, SATs standardisation isn’t ‘standard’ as 100 should be the mean average, whereas 105 is closer to the actual mean average. The govt have set 100 to be the required standard. It means that a fairly predictable proportion of DC (maybe 30-40%) will not meet the required standard no matter how hard DC and schools work. It’s all nonsense. How can you set a target that is limited by standardisation? All it will measure is your DCs attainment vs their cohort, not their attainment vs a set level.

[RabbityMcRabbit]

Everyone tells me though that SATS aren’t about the kids- they are to measure the school- so if that’s the case, why should I tell her?

This is definitely not true! KS2 SATS results are used to predict what a child should achieve at GCSE