To thinks SATs don’t really matter?

[whodawhodaeho]

DD is year 6 and her class teacher( and year head) has told them that if they don’t do well in SATs then they’ll be put with the disruptive, badly behaved kids in ‘big’ school. Ie put in lower sets forever

I have told her this is nonsense - that the new school will assess her themselves up til Oct half term then stream sets for certain subjects (which they do - her DB is there ) and the SATs don’t matter.
And they continually assess and move kids around according to ability/ progress through school terms/ years

YABU - yes they matter, and yes secondary school will pay attention to the results

YANBU - they don’t really matter

Not all badly behaved kids are in the lower sets but I tend to see the badly behaved ones are in sets 3 and 4. Now that is a mixture of ability and attitude to learning.

For our SEND and very low-ability students they do have their class, but you have badly behaved kids in there because they need the small group setting as well or they are SEND. But we can't have set for every possible outcome. We don't have the staff or resources and that is the truth. So yeah badly behaved children do end up in lower ability groups because they don't want to learn and so are not as high ability as set 1 and 2 who are behaved. And we do teach differently depending on the set.

We do our best for everyone. If you are appalled then talk to your MP about the fact schools haven't got enough money to hire proper SEND teachers or enough teachers to have more sets.

But I have noticed that the worse the behavior, the lower the group and the lower the grade. That is a fact. And behavior and manners start at home.

You are so right. I grew up in the Irish system. My kids are in the U.K. system. I could type for an hour all the stuff that has utterly shocked me over the course of the primary years - particularly between ages 4 and 7. Identifying these kids for special treatment at that age based on their skill at taking tests does impact on their confidence, and constitutes a really crap launch into learning for many children. I have a Mum friend who described her 5 year old son as "not academic" based on feedback at his parent teacher meeting in his second year of formal education - dreadful stuff.

HOW does "progress 8" affect an individual pupil? Just how? I have absolutely zero clue what my daughter's progress 8 score is. How will this affect her GCSE/A-level results? The answer is it will have zero bearing on them. The only people who care about "progress 8" are those running the schools.

Just because you don't understand how it works doesn't mean it won't make any difference. If she is achieving a 5 and meant to great. If she's above target great for her and the school. If her target is 6 she may get more focus. Google educational triage, it still applies but now to individual targets but over a cohort so if you get a few 2 above you can afford some 2 below to come out at 0.
When you were at school teachers may have put attention to getting weaker students to a C and not stretched A to A* or whatever the measure was with cse or o levels, 5 good passes or whatever.

Some posters sound naieve. Of course what Gymrabbit and CSTeacher say is true. Sets are important. If your school is good / normal, Set 1 and 2 for maths and English have very bright kids, not much / very little mucking about, because they want to be there.

The thing is, the DfE uses progress 8 specifically to affect schools’ behaviour - it doesn’t force these statistical measures on schools just as a matter of vague interest. And many parents hypocritically pay attention to them, too, whilst simultaneously claiming they don’t make a difference to their actual children. As with hospital waiting times and all other statistics, the effects statistics have on behaviour are not always the ones desired - ie they almost never result in a general improvement in everything you want an organisation to do well, they tend instead to make other things worse due to an unnatural focus on the things capable of being measured.

If your child’s particular needs do not fall within the needs of the groups of children identified statistically as needing particular attention by the school in order to improve its progress 8 score, then your child’s needs being met will have a lower priority than those of the group being focused on, because spending the money and time on your child won’t affect the statistics. Where funding is lacking and teaching vacancies abundant, you may perceive the effect on your child quite distinctly. If your child does not need specific support, but is fairly well-behaved and bright and served well by the general class teaching they are receiving already, without needing any more of a push than that, then it won’t matter too much.

Because decisions are made with that in mind. Just as a simple example:

There are two classes who are achieving broadly in line with each other.
Class A are mostly attaining in line for 4s and 5s in their GCSE. Their targets, generated from their SAT results, are also 4s and 5s.
Class B are also mostly attaining in line for 4s and 5s in their GCSE. However, some of their targets are 6s and even a 7 or two.

When deciding on which staff are going to teach which classes next year, SLT will consider this. To the kids, parents and class teachers, these classes seem the same. To SLT, class A will generate a neutral or positive Progress 8 score and the class B be negative. SLT will decide to give the stronger teacher, with a better track record, to class B because they need to make more progress. If your child was in class B, they get the stronger teacher and are pushed to make more progress and achieve a higher result. If you child was in class A, quite basically, they don't get that same priority.

As I said in my earlier post. This is exactly what happened to my DSs. The lower SATs/ Progress 8 result my elder DS achieved had no intervention, as the flight path was fine, the younger one had so much more thrown at him as he was on target for 7s and was slipping. Infact he came out with a couple of 9s seems unfair tbh.

You could say that statistics like Progress 8 affect your specific child precisely because statistical measurements have no interest whatsoever in specific children as unique individuals - they force the focus onto groups of children who can be lumped together. Your child as an individual could therefore all too easily fall through the statistical cracks and not get the attention they need and deserve.

I guess all these nonsensical SAT/progress 8 and similar measures is why people go private 🤷‍♀️

If private schools don't care about them, they clearly make no difference to the actual student and are completely arbitrary measures.

🤣Oh yes, of course, private schools have no interest whatsoever in their statistics 🤣🤣🤣.

In which case, you're dealing with the "grouped by destination" issue. If your child's a potential Oxbridge candidate, they'll get loads of support thrown at them so they can maximise the number of children with those destinations. If their academic ability suggests less, they'll get less.

There is always a "game" being played somewhere and you need to be aware of it to navigate it properly to your advantage.

It really depends on the individual private school. Private schools differ a lot

You can guarantee it was privately educated politicians who came up with the idea of testing primary school children and tracking their progress. Private schools love their entrance exams, end of year exams, 11 plus and 13 plus prep, and brochures and academic achievement boards advertising how many students they get into top public schools, or Oxbridge, or Ivy League universities every year. Few celebrate poor academic achievement.

Absolutely but everyone is judged by something and they will prioritise that by which they are judged. It's necessary for the continued survival of the organisation.

For example, one of our local private primaries does enter SATs. However, they handpick the kids they enter for it based on whether they know for certain if that student will get a score in or above age-related. They take great pride in publishing an article every year about how 100% of their children "pass". They do this to try and boost the number of new applicants they have each year but what they fail to reveal is that only 6 out of the 15 in the cohort were ever entered for the test.

@Walkaround yes heaven forfend there should be any accountability or measure of progress for a primary aged pupil. The old days when whole swathes of children could be gently failed and then quietly shovelled off to secondary was so much better.

I don't love SATS but they are an improvement on the nothing we had before.

It is worth noting that the removal of the Y9 SATs did contribute to a change to KS3 that later allowed academic research to find that Y7, Y8 and Y9 were "the Wasted Years" where very little progress was made. Whilst some schools have made moves to address that since the publication of that research, there are others in which the children typically slide backwards during the first few years due to lowered expectations, the splitting of subjects and being less of a priority for the school than they were before.

In which case maybe streaming should not be done if it can’t be done effectively and fairly. When I went to school there were 3 sets for maths and English from GCSEs onwards. Everything else was just mixed. This seems a much better system.

I think mixed ability groups are extremely beneficial on many levels.

‘that in the vast majority of secondary schools they will be used to generate GCSE targets. ‘

well that’s just not true. Thank god. What does getting a question correct on fronted adverbials have to to do with Spanish, biology, music, chemistry, ethics, DT and on and on …

But it is true! How can you have read your whole thread and still not understand this. KS2 sats are used to generate GCSE target grades in all mainstream state schools in England. Schools have no choice in this.

Actually it is much less fair to not stream. We started the year without streaming and the children were mixed and in their tutor groups. You have very low-ability, middle ability, high ability, SEND and badly behaved all together. You end up with groups that have more higher ability or more SEND or, and we did have this, two full groups of badly behaved children who played off each other.

Teachers need to be able to teach to the ability of the child and we cannot do that if they are mixed. I definitely teach differently to my top set vs my lower sets because I am adapting to them and that is the truth of it. Top set will get through a task and on to the extension in the same time it will take lower set to get through half the task.

Sets work and I have seen it have an impact on a bright, but badly behaved young man where before he was in his mixed ability tutor group and was acting out, but once the sets were made and he was placed in a top set group his behavior and attitude changed, which I said as much to his parents at parents evening.

Sets have always been a thing, just now there are a few more of them rather than the standard three. We have 5. And as it has been stated in other posts, badly behaved children tend to be those who require the lower ability groups because the groups are smaller or the SEND groups because they have more TAs.

And many parents at my school are very happy with the sets as they know that the sets are there to ensure that we are teaching the children at their level and not going too high or too low for them.

Mixed ability groups are not beneficial. We cannot teach at a mixed ability level because some children will not be challenged enough and others too challenged, and mixed ability creates cracks that SEND children fall through because we are busy dealing with badly behaved children who have no respect for their peers who want to learn.

Also sets do work on some badly behaved children because whereas before they were with their friends, now they are in sets and for some it pushes them to work harder and behave more so that they can move up sets, which a lot of parents want too.

And just like you’ve identified one of the know limits of the system. It tests a very small set of skills tested.

You’re perfectly entitled to your opinion of course, I’m sure sets benefit some pupils and teachers.

I can’t see why teachers can’t teach mixed ability groups, they managed it perfectly well through my school life. There was a certain amount of leading be example from the good and bright kids, class detentions meant peer pressure to behave well. All teaching and knowledge was available to all kids.

I left secondary school with the top A level marks in the year, yet I started it lagging behind in reading and maths. If I had been put in bottom classes with disruptive pupils, firstly it would have been too much, I would have hated school, disengaged had extremely poor mental health. It would never have allowed me to progress (I was a late developer, I didn’t read until 7). I had number blindness until around age 11.

I suspect sets are more for the benefit of the teachers than pupils (plus a sense of superiority for those in top sets).

it’s clear from your post you would probably label kids in bottom sets as likely the disruptive ones. Have you ever thought this grouping together of kids and lower expectations of them might be a self fulfilling prophecy?

All children should be elevated upwards, sets only serve to perpetuate inequality.

I came from a poor working class background, by mixing with kids with different home lives, and therefore often different attitudes to learning, behaviour, expectations and experiences it elevated me.

A child’s ability at 11 is only really a reflection of where they have come from, by perpetuating that in sets from an early age, schools are limiting where these children are going.

Sets might benefit the already advantaged, but they effectively keep the already advantaged in their position. Once a child has been in a lower set for a while it’s nearly impossible to extricate themselves from a cycle of reduced access to higher level knowledge and lower expectations. Even if, by some miracle, they do manage to climb out of the pit the educational system and life opportunities has dug for them they spend years playing catch up.

Parents are aware of this bias towards higher achieving pupils, being easier and more pleasant to teach. That’s why many spend a small fortune in tutors fees to make up for often limited education. But again this, when linked to a structure involving sets, gives certain pupils unfair advantages, less well off children with poorly educated parents don’t get this advantage.

For these, and many reasons, I think sets are an extremely bad idea. They are simply a reflection of societal structure with perhaps the odd few managing to escape.

IME children learn as much from other children as adults.

And your comment regarding badly behaved kids not wanting to learn is horrifying! No wonder they have disengaged from the school! These poor kids are being written off. Why don’t they want to learn? Why are they disruptive?

it’s clear that the system at your school is writing off large numbers of children, most likely the ones most in need of help. Many of those kids probably go home to families where the parents don’t care if they are in school or not, what grades they get, they probably tell their kids school is a waste of time, they’ll never amount to anything, they get to school surrounded by kids who have the same issues, teachers who clearly think the same, what bloody hope does that child have?

i heard a statistic the other day from the NSPCC. 7 kids out of every class will suffer abuse before the age of 18. I would bet the number in your bottom sets is much higher.

I could actually cry at the system you think is beneficial.

Whole heartedly agree!