To think that SATS are more important than people let on?

[Inthehottub]

On mumsnet I always find that the general consensus is that SATS aren’t important.

Once upon a time I would have agreed.

However, now I’ve experienced having a child go through secondary school and GCSEs, I would say that SATS results are very important.

Our experience was that the SATS results determine which sets the child goes into in secondary school and also the GCSE predicted grades. I know that there are other assessments too, but SATS are a large part of it.

Our experience of secondary school was also that the ‘top set’ kids get absolutely everything thrown at getting them those top grades. I was also told by teachers and pupils alike that the lower sets tend to have more disruptive children so it’s harder for the quieter less able kids to work their way up out of the bottom sets.

Obviously that’s only my experience having had two go through secondary school and one now approaching sats.

Interested to know what others think.

Yabu - SATS are not important
Yanbu - they are very important

Oh I give up - all the processes described above are all on gov.uk for all to read.

Please listen to the OP - it’s not what you are told or what set they are in or if they don’t set or if they tell you they don’t set but do or only do it in yr 9 - no state secondary school can escape the accountability measures in place and all these measures for secondary schools are based on ks2 SATs scores.

As for the ludicrous idea that test scores somehow only show the efforts of a child/the school/the parents/the peer group alone - I want to laugh and cry. Academic test results are always the result of the mixture of these factors. SATs (or any other exam) never show just the school’s input or just the child’s efforts or just the parents’ support or just the tutor’s work.

This is the whole fiction/lie at the heart of the accountability measures - schools are not able to be responsible for all the scores achieved/progress made - it isn’t down to just them!

So if you do want your child to do well at GCSE (whatever that means for you - 11 grade 9s and then 4 As and off to Trinity or 5 grade 5s and picking the course they want at FE college without having to retake maths) and for your secondary school to try their best for your child then yes passing their SATs is a good place to start!

OP it really depends on the school. We had 6 realistic options to choose from when doing our secondary application for dd, of those, 5 definitely don’t use SATs data to stream. One might, we didn’t put it on our application for other reasons so I didn’t bother looking much more into it. (Dc1 was one of the Covid SATs cancelled years so we don’t really know if his school would have used it or not).

2 local options do their own testing in the first week of year 7 before setting. The others put them in forms based on either random allocation or where they live, teach in form groups for all subjects in year 7 and then stream in year 8 purely based off end of year 7 exams.

I have heard of some schools like yours @Inthehottubthat stream off sats data from year 7 but that’s purely schools that care more about their progress 8 ranking than the quality of education the children receive.

This should be one of those questions parents are primed to ask when they visit secondary schools- and reject any that stream off year 6 SATs. Never a good sign.

Anyone in secondary school management will know exactly how important SATs results are. It’s a complete lie or lack of understanding to say it’s only a measure of how the primary school is doing.

SATs form the basis of GCSE targets and secondary schools performance is judged against these targets, so it becomes a priority to get children to achieve them. So if your child achieves well at SATs, they’ll have high predictions for GCSE and the school will go all out to get your child those grades. If your child underperforms in SATs, their predictions will be lower, and the school will have little inclination to push them to achieve above these low targets.

When I say school, I’m not talking about individual teachers. Although teachers pay is also related to their classes performance against targets, the significant majority of teachers I’ve met hate targets and want to get the best out of their students. But school resources will be allocated (intervention as
PP has mentioned) to meet the SATs driven targets.

This is where the drive for measurable performance targets has brought us.

University admissions look at predicted A level grades, not predicted GCSE which are already achieved by then?

I have current Y13 child applied to unis and he has friends across multiple academies, private and grammar schools and none of them received their predicted grades for uni admissions until the beginning of Y13? How could their Y6 SATS result possibly influence predicted grades in A level Economics or Chinese any other subject that they'd never heard of in year 6?

I'm a secondary teacher. Every school I have worked at have used SATS results to set. I'm very surprised by the number of people here saying otherwise.

A student might be moved up to a higher set during the course of the year as it becomes apparent that they are doing better, but in a large school, they can easily find themselves set again in the lower sets the next year. I've seen this happen a lot; they essentially have to prove themselves over and over again because the leaders don't know them personally, so they revert back to being set based on SATs each year.

Also, if a child has a low prediction, as long as they are getting that, the school isn't overly concerned with them. Of course their individual class teachers will support them to overachieve, but they won't receive the centralised extra interventions and push that those with higher target grades would get.

My youngest is about to do her SATs, and much though I want to think it won't matter, I have to acknowledge that secondary school will be easier for her if she does as well as she can.

Totally depends on the high school. Some will set from day one using Sats other prefer to do there own assessments of students and won't set in Year 7 at all. I prefer the latter, I think basing sets in high school on SATS results is a poor show from the high school they are assuming the inly thing that matters is the high aciving students. The latter type of schools often see there progress 8 score as more import or just as import as results. So showing that they can improve student outcomes rather then just focusing on those at the top end.

But they are streaming - they might not physically cluster those pupils together but they know who they have to get where by 16.

They know parents are super twitchy about streaming early in KS3 so many say they don’t - but it literally doesn’t matter where the kids sit - they have their groups - the C/D borderlines, the A* group, the failed SATs but might get a C crowd and these will be targeted and supported in a manner which gets the best results overall for the school.

I answered YABU as our secondary school does not stream children at all and only uses sets in specific subjects from y9. By then they'll have a much clearer idea of children's ability and it would make no sense to base teaching decisions on SATS.

This poster explained it better than I did, but this is absolutely the case.

This.

This.

It's kind of bonkers and unfair that teachers get bonuses based on children exam performance because round here most of the children are having tuition in at least one or two subjects - usually core subjects/ those where the teaching is known to be inadequate

And that's been the case for decades

I have no desire for the following to be the case BUT

Of secondaries are to be held accountable for p8 based on ks2 SATS then primaries should have to have their SATS externally invigilated, marked and moderated. It is really unfair for primaries to be able to stitch up their local high schools in this way. Whilst making themselves look.amazing for ofsted.

Our high school has a couple of feeder primaries which have amazing ofsted and sats profiles (they're from a very slick MAT) . Those dc from those schools are not in any way more academic, better educated or brighter than the rest and they do not go on to be mostly in the top sets in a disproportionate way post yr 7 CAT tests. They do not go on to get stellar gcses in an overt way either. This seems very unfair on the high school.

I do think some proper longitudinal research into this would be interesting as it's a locally focused phenomena (and the non researchers in the local community all feel the MAT inflates their results or provides far more coaching and help than it should during SATS)

Yes and no. It’s a marker but not a determination. My child’s school sets an aspirational flight path based on a combination of SATS results and year 7 testing during freshers week but they don’t set until year 9.

My concern right now is Options and whether my child will be able to take the exams they need to be able to do the career they want to do. There are a choice of four flight paths and that dictates how many GCSEs you are able to take. I’ve no idea if SATS have any bearing on that.

It depends on the school. I specifically chose a school for my DC that had a progress 8 that was as good for the 'low achievers' as it was for the middle and high achievers. Even though my DC weren't low achievers, I thought it reflected that the school genuinely cared about progress across the board. That has turned out to be true. The teaching is very good and I am confident that they are not manipulating the system.

PS - for the absolute avoidance of doubt - I don’t think anyone in education likes this process but to ignore that it happens seems wilfully obtuse.

It's kind of bonkers and unfair that teachers get bonuses based on children exam performance

Teachers don't get bonuses, they just don't get put on a support plan if the class achieves the targets.

Did you not even look at FFT data and targets?

I completely agree with this. My daughter's headteacher was rubbing out and changing children's answers during SATS

And heavily coaching them for a couple of hours each morning before they sat each test

The sats results were not used for setting at my child's school. The school used their own tests/observations after the first term.
They matter for school League tables but have no impact on the child's actual education

TAGS and CAGS shouldn't have used SATS at all. They should have used work done in the past 5 years by those students.

Of secondaries are to be held accountable for p8 based on ks2 SATS then primaries should have to have their SATS externally invigilated, marked and moderated.

They are.

Surely if schools want the best possible progress 8, they will encourage all children to do better than predicted? Locally to me, the schools all want to have a high positive progress 8.

They aren't independently invigilated. Or not consistently. My daughter's headteacher was cheating with impunity and I expect has spent her entire career doing the same (she has lots of accolades for dramatic improvements in SATS results at each primary she heads up)

It’s not true that the higher the set you are the bigger the priority you are. In my experience the grade targets for top sets are often relatively low, and the majority of top set students can outperform them without too much trouble. There’s a number of factors that can mean a student becomes a ‘priority’, such as underperforming compared to their target grade, or underperforming in maths while predicted to get a 5 in English. If you look at all the performance measures for schools, a child just underperforming will be a focus of the school.