Bad SATs Results

[Dramatic]

Our local school just released their SATs results, my friend has a child in year 6 and she shared a photo of her son's results and on the bottom it had the schools results with the pass rates for each subject in percentages.

Maths 32%
Reading 41%
Grammar 40%

Now I'm not one to think that test results are the be all and end all but these seem to be incredibly low. DH thinks I should just disregard them but AIBU to think about not sending our daughter there? It's just a Junior school so we have options to send her elsewhere in Year 3.

That would worry me a lot. It doesn’t mean the teachers aren’t doing a good job with the cohort they have got, but it might be a rather frustrating learning experience for an able, motivated child. It suggests a combination of low ability, behavioural issues, low aspiration and/or very bad teaching.

In all honestly i wouldn't touch this school with a barge pole. In our school at least those percentages would achieve greater depth.

@cassgate good lord, 6 EHCPs in one class?!

Deprived areas can have different results down to culture, some cultures value education more than others

It’s not just crap schools.

If you have children who enter reception who don’t know how to hold and turn a book, can’t do self care tasks and aren’t used to playing with others then it’s not the same as a cohort who can write their own name, numbers 0 to 5, blend cvc words are who are well socialised.

Those results are horrendous, I wouldn’t want my children to go there either. The school are obviously doing something wrong somewhere.

@WhenYouSayNothingAtAll cohorts can impact figures but then I live in a rural area where it is not unknown for the number of Y6s in the school to only be in single figures so each pupil’s results makes a huge difference. But in these schools the results won’t be published nationally as the results can be skewed so much due to cohort size.

They are very low scores. The 2025 national average was 62%. I only know that because the head teacher of the school my Y6 daughter just left was crowing about it as the school achieved 100% this year. (To be fair it's a small school with very high expectations and this is the first year they managed 100%).

I'm not someone who is too focused on SAT scores but overall what the "pass mark" is supposed to indicate is readiness for secondary school. A primary where the majority of pupils are not ready for secondary when they leave is really not looking good at all. I would be considering all options in your position.

I hate the term 'bad sats results'. A child is either academic or they are not and as long as they try their best, that's all that we can ask.

All the remarks stating the results are horrendous, is that what you would think if your own child scored below 100, that their results were horrendous?

I have 2 children, one who is working above expectations and my other working towards. I am equally proud of them both, they both work to the best of their abilities.

It maybe the case that the school is not educating the children correctly or it maybe the case they had a cohort who are not academic but tried their best. I just hope the parents of the children working towards expectations have told their kids, they are still proud of them.

OP said it’s an average size, one form entry class. I know quite a bit about cohort sizes and makeup , however there is a point where poor results are just poor results.Yes, there will be outliers, but I’m talking in general here.Out of curiosity, do you know the pass rate at your rural school? Is it as low as the one in the OP? Particularly for Maths?

For those of you saying that you wouldn’t send your child to a school with results like this, be careful what you wish for. You have no idea what the cohort make up will be year on year. Children leave, new children join. The reception class your child joins now might look very different by the time you get to year 6. This is why measuring by SATs alone is nonsense. This year we had 2 children join who spoke very little English. We used google translate to communicate. 1 of them left us just before SATS and sat them at her new school. The other sat them. He was actually strong in maths so the arithmetic paper basically got him through and he got expected standard by 1 mark. We had 2 children with ehcps working at year 1 level, who were never going to achieve expected standard but they did really well for them, scoring far higher than we were expecting. I can say hand on heart that we worked so hard with them this year and although they didn’t achieve expected standard we can show progress for every child in the class. We are rated outstanding and were inspected this year, so go figure, an outstanding school with low SATs results this year. The inspectors were aware of this years likely low results as we told them, they observed lessons with this class, looked at books from this year and last and looked at data for this cohort going back to reception and concluded it was just one if those years. We also highlighted the other class in the school which is also likely to be low due to the 6 ehcps. Again, they concluded that teaching was outstanding and that we were doing everything we could. Low results does not mean that the school is doing something wrong.

Our school performs well (65-80% achieve the expected standard most years), but is something of an exams factory. My own child came out with exceptional results (average 116) but was not the highest in the school. Achieving this involves a lot of work, a lot of past papers practice and (in honesty) a lot of stress for the children. The teachers put the work in because of how it reflects on them, but I don’t think it works well for the children. They are too young for that kind of pressure, and the many weeks doing past papers isn’t conducive to a love of learning (we had papers home for both Easter and May holidays, and I think actually had some marked papers home at Christmas).

of course, it’s important for children to achieve certain core skills, and low grades are worrying, but the SATs reflect what that cohort did under exam conditions. If the school is challenging, then endless past papers might not create the right dynamic for learning.

Why is that terrible?
It could be (for example)...
1 with dyslexia
1 with hearing issues
1 with autism
1 with a general learning disability
1 with a medical issue that means they are off school a lot.

How low were the results this year?

@Needmorelego not all children on that list would necessarily get an EHCP, certainly not in our area! Might be K code ie on SEN register but wouldn’t necessarily get EHCP

@WhenYouSayNothingAtAll it’s not just one school, many schools in our area are mixed year, so can range from 30 Y6s to no Y6s! A school could have 100% ARE one year (with 1 child in Y6) to 0% the following as the 2 pupils in Y6 got less than 100. Cohort makes a huge difference.

OP is talking about an average sized class. I did say outliers exist, whether that’s one school or several in an area, they’re still outliers.

Well yes...
In my daughter's Year 6 class if we counted the ones without an EHCP and/or an official diagnosis it was way more than 6 children.
(my daughter was one of the undiagnosed)
I was commenting more on the fact that the person I replied to seemed horrified that there might be 6 children with extra needs....6 is scratching the service of many classes.

I taught a class this year where practically every child had some kind of SEND issue ranging from emotional/mental health, to ADHD/Autism, or dyslexia and cognitive/processing delays. Not one of them had an EHCP, because EHCP’s tend to be for the highest level / most severe needs. The additional funding for an EHCP is such that the student generally gets a one-to-one or one-to-two TA to support them. It represents a very high need.

I just checked the stats, and on average about 1 in 20 students gets an EHCP. That means 1 per class or occasionally 2.
Six in a single class would be very, very unusual, and is unheard of in my experience up until now.

@Needmorelego the national average for Primary school EHCPs is about 5%, so 6 in one class, depending on size of class is around 20%. K code average is about 13%, so it’s even higher than that. That is high level of need, especially as there will be others on K code too.

@EvilEdna44 ok.... I understand your point - having 6 with EHCPs is unusual, but having at least 6 with SEN is pretty normal.
Although my daughter's class had 2 with extreme food allergies and 1 that had to take a specific medication throughout the day. I assume they would have had EHCPs for that.
People think EHCP = "learning disabilities" when it doesn't always.

And many EHCPs nowadays don’t always provide 1:1 funding, they usually state there should be ‘some’ individual or group intervention work but not a full-time TA. But that doesn’t mean level of need is lower

Looking st these results, assuming 30-31 kids in the class:

• 9-10 kids passed maths, about 21 did not!
• 12 kids passed english, about 18 did not

My son’s special school (dyslexia/adhd focus, 100% ehcp) has substantial better results…. One of our local state schools with the r number of ehcpd, English as second language has pass rates of about 80% There is something going on here - potentially they are very good with SENDS, so are kind of a special school in disguise.

@Needmorelego allergies don’t always result in EHCP. They would have a Health plan with the school, but that is different.

I thought most primary schools cheated with SATS to starve off Ofsted