Were the SATs really that hard?

[SquashAndPineapple]

Ok, so my DS is basically Mr Average! I mean literally. It's uncanny! I kid you not, he's the walking talking version of average! He's bang on 50th centile for height! He was bang on the 50th centile for the recent BMI thing they did at school! He's pretty much bang in the middle of the class for SPAG, reading and maths. He is my walking, talking little version of the average UK yr 6 kid!!

He has had a LOT of practice SATs stuff come home from school in the last few months. Some of it quite hard IMO!!

I asked him how the reading SATs went because the media has gone mad with how hard it was. He said it was a bit like all the practice ones, maybe a bit easier!

So .... Was it really that hard?

If my little Mr Average found it .... well ... average (or even a bit easier than average), then is this just the media stirring things up? Anyone else have an average kid that found the paper kind of middly? None of DSs friends seem to have found it exceptionally hard. Obviously, they may have all done terribly and just thought it was fine when actually it wasn't, but ..... ?

Any thoughts!?

There was a lot of coverage last year saying it was the easiest paper ever seen, so quite plausible that it has now swung the other way to make a point. My year 4 child has been made miserable by SATs this week (his class has had to be working in silence for much of the week as the adjoining classroom has been used for SATs) and my Year 7 has been set hugely unrealistic targets at secondary because of the stupid way they use the results in the reading and maths papers to track 'progress'. I think we need to get rid of them and quite happy to thrown stuff at anyone that thinks otherwise.

Teacher here...yes, it was really hard! It had one of the longest word counts we've ever experienced, and the data analysis that has been done and released today, has shown that our 90wpm readers (which is pretty good going!) would have had only 34 seconds to complete each question.

So yes, it was very, very challenging.

Mine was worried after the mocks as he found them pretty hard. We assumed the sats would be far harder. I’ve been helping him as much as I can while telling him how unimportant they are really. And he came home with the biggest smile on his face, he flew through them with no problems whatsoever, they were easy compared to the mocks and he wished he hadn’t put so much time into revising for them 🤷🏼‍♀️

DD hit almost full marks in her mocks and she said it was extremely hard in that you couldn't infer the answer from the text and you had to have some knowledge about what they were discussing.

A lady on 5 live explained it well earlier. She said imagine if the question was about skiing and some children were not living in an environment where skiing was the norm.

So the question for example might be what was the child scared of and one of the answers was the lift. Well if you don't know anything about the skiing environment you can't fathom why getting into a lift might be scary and therein lies the problem - you aren't at that stage testing ability.

Yeah last years was really lovely actually in comparison to other years. We thought they might 'go easy' on us after Covid, and they did in Year 6...not so in poor Year 2 last year however, where they made it much harder for them! It was really quite mean!

Was it the question about a part of the UK that was the problem (I know we can't discuss in any detail).

Oh dear! I think that might mean my little Mr average has probably not reached 'expected' standard :( and maybe hasn't reached his usual 'average' position :(

Weird that most of the kids in his year weren't bothered by it though? Do you think some schools have been preparing them for the possibility of a super long word count? or somehow knew what to prep the kids for???

34sec per question ... Blimey! (I think I'd have not reached expected standards myself if this was harder than some of the practice papers we've had home (which I struggled with, and I have a PhD!!!!! 😳😳😁😁😁😁)

I’ve no idea what my dd did in her mocks and we’ve done no prep at home. I know she’s been prepping at school and a bit of homework. She was nervous at the start but hasn’t seemed that phased about them. Like you op my dd is fairly average, she dose well in some subjects but never top of the class.

I think the fact we told her they are pointless and mean nothing about her or her abilities helped.

It was tricky to be honest! Some questions made even me really have to think about what would be accepted as an appropriate answer, and I’ve been involved in SATs for years. It was lengthy, difficult to pluck out quick easy wins from the text, and some misleading questions.
If your DS is feeling happy with how he did, then I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It’s standardised anyway!

I'm amazed this has hit the news. SATS are testing teachers and schools, not the kids .
Kids should not be stressed about them.

I asked my boy. "Yeah fine" was the answer so I guess we'll see!

But my kids' school uses them to set for maths so they really are testing the kids!

Teaching in a very diverse school in an area of socioeconomic deprivation, with an exceptionally high number of EAL pupils, I did raise an eyebrow at the evident assumptions about pupil experience and relatability.
Sure, a certain type of child will have had the kinds of experiences which would have made them familiar with certain terminology and agricultural references as part of their childhoods, either by virtue of residence or the privilege of vacationing in relevant areas. My EAL pupils, most of whom have perfectly passable levels of proficiency and functional English, still have never encountered what I would class as quite niche vocabulary, and much less metaphorical figures of speech which also came up. It made me feel a bit sad, and has caused me to assume that the creators of these assessments are not working with the whole cohort of 2022-2023 Y6 pupils in mind, but rather children just like their own, which is likely not a broad and inclusive representation of all eligible pupils.

Why are children revising for SATs?!

Mine was given revision booklets and a study guide for sats. We were told that they should be taking 30-40 minute breaks between studying. Mine never studied for that long I’m one go!

My ds is over expectations in spag and reading but barely passed the maths mock SAT. So he was very worried about that.
I specifically asked him about them, spag he thinks he smashed, reading one hes pretty confident and he said it was easy however the school i work in (not a teacher) i know there were complaints in how hard it was.
Maths was his biggest challenge but he feels ok about it.
I told his teacher on Tuesday when she rang me about something unrelated i had told him they werent important far too much pressure is put on children for SATs when they dont really mean anything. I think they should go, year after year more pressure is put on them.

That's quite sad :( I've no idea what the questions were but DS doesn't have loads of experience of life outside our village, so starting to question how he's done! :(

DS's school have been setting SATs practice questions (about an hour and a half a week) every week since before Christmas. When he didn't do it one week (we had a busy week, no time for SATs h omework!) they made him stay in at lunch 3 days in a row to finish them :(

This is unacceptable. A study guide for SATs, which mean nothing to the children at all. Shameful.

Pp who said they are used to decide sets - this means children should definitely not becrevusing for them, as they need to be set according to their actual ability and potential, not their results from over-revising.

But why the sad face in reference to your son? He's happy with how it went, the results are utterly meaningless to him on a personal level - they are only meaningful to the school when they look at their averages. Children have no reason at all to even know their score.
I do agree that it is sad for the children who have been made to feel like they've failed because they don't have the cultural capital to relate to the questions - but your son had a positive experience. He needs not to think about it, and same for you.

This means they are using them to ensure your child is in the right set. Pushing children to get into a top set isn't helpful and shouldn't be seen as the "goal".

This is so sad. Once aft privilege rules !!

I’m more pissed off that the kids at DD's school were threatened with the head turning up at the door if they were absent, playtimes suspended and told they'd be escorted to the toilet by a teacher so no one could pass on answers.
One teacher said "Don't come crying to me if you don't do well"
One day we were 5 minutes late, school called me repeatedly and I was told that the deputy head was about to get in her car and come to our house. She wouldn’t have found us there!

Teachers should not be pressurising kids over SATs . I always told my DC they were a test of the school only.

They got to secondary and were tested again with CATs . Neither test should be considered gospel as to how well DCs do academically in the long run.

For those of you complaining about schools prepping children for sats, if Ofsted and the DfE didn't use them as yet another tool to beat schools with, it wouldn't be happening. Don't blame the schools, write to your MP about the education crisis. Except they probably don't care