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

Not important.

Kids don't stay in the same set as they start at either. They are tested through the year and moves are made at certain points if it's thought necessary.

It sounds like more that the secondary school your children were at was a bit crap and was lazy about properly noticing different children's ability levels.

SATS are designed to test the impact of the teaching a child received at primary school. The results are a reflection on the school not the child. An intelligent child badly taught will get a low SATS grade.

A senior school receiving the information that a child got a low SATS result should be using that information only to help them identify which children might need additional support to catch up with a presumption that it was due to poor teaching rather than low ability until this is proven otherwise. Putting the children into ability based sets on the basis of SATS results is perverse. Most good senior schools start everyone in mixed ability classes and give everyone the chance to catch up at first and unly start using sets later on.

Teachers don’t get bonuses, but if progression on the pay scale can be held back if you don’t meet your performance management targets (including your year 11 class meeting their GCSE targets). So don’t worry about a teacher getting a bonus when it was private tuition that ensured students met their targeted - think of the poor teachers in deprived areas, with lack of parental support, no chance of private tuition, and a primary school that worked to inflate their year 6 SATs results, who get held back years on the pay scale.

We’re in an area that has grammar schools. After the hell that is 11plus tuition (yes I know we could choose not to) no one except the school was bothered about the SATS. We didn’t do any additional prep outside of school for it.

my oldest are at grammar schools and they’re not placed in sets (except for maths from Y9).

I never sat my year 6 SATS

Still ended up in top sets for maths, English and science, still left with 11 GCSEs, 3 A Levels and still got an BA (Hons) undergraduate degree.

Of course. In an ideal world you want every child to exceed their targeted. Exceed their aspirational target (or FFT20/5). But resources are so scarce in schools you have to make tough decisions about deployment.

Primary schools cheat on the SATS as well. It's really common

That's what I meant ( sorry if it wasn't clear!). It's the teachers who don't have a tutored cohort who lose out

I think there is a lot of naivety on this thread. I have been a secondary school teacher at 4 different schools. Both LEA and Academies.

Secondary schools are measured on SATS results versus GCSE results and the progress made. The SATs results may not be important to an individual child but they are incredibly important for a cohort to show progress. How would a school know whether they are making a difference if you have no sort of benchmark? SATs are externally marked standardised tests so are useful for this. Of course there are anomalies--kids who underachieve on their sats, struggle with exams etc. but generally they are a good indicator of where a child is at that moment.

I currently teach the lowest Year 7 English set at my school; I do look at their SATS results to help me plan my lessons. There are around 16 students in my class with SATS results from sub-90 to around 95. It helps me pitch my lessons-especially for the first term while I get to know them. We do set based on SATS but they are fluid and if it is obvious that a child is in the wrong place then they move. This continues throughout their school careerbut SATS are as good a start point as any standardised test. I don't know why people seem to think that setting on the school's own Year 7 tests is any differentsome will underachieve/some overachieve--any test will have the same potential downfalls as SATs.

For my own children I would look for a school that setted in core subjects from Year 7. The Year 7 students I teach this year would be the ones that would suffer from a mixed ability group: they wouldn't be getting the help they needed to improve their literacy by a teacher trying to stretch the most ablewhilst helping others to form sentences. I am aware that according to data progression my set will be likely to not achieve a grade 4 in English and the interventions to help them do that starts from Year 7. Not because I want the school to get a good progress 8 score, but because I want these students to achieve a pass grade in English if they can and be able to go on and study whatever courses they would like at college. If we focus on helping students to become literate and have high aspirations, whatever their sats scores, then they will achieve the best they can at every level which will set them up for the future. A by-product of making sure students achieve their potential will be that the school has good progress scoresbut the priority should always be the students.

I think it is really disingenuous for any school leader to say they pay no attention to SATs. Whether they agree with it or not it is literally the foundations of their work.

Sorry--I've no idea why half is crossed out!

SATS only matter to primary schools because it shows how good cow

Meaningless for children, SATS measure how well the teachers are teaching and nothing more.

Absolutely hilarious how many people are saying “my child’s school doesn’t set in year 7 so SATs are irrelevant” whilst many secondary school teachers are saying “SATs absolutely matter if you want your child to get intervention / support to achieve well at GCSE”.

For those who asked - kids from prep schools / without SATs are (ime) assumed to be around national average so given a target of 5. If they’re bright but a bit lazy so getting a 6 they won’t be pushed to get the 8 they’re capable of.

All teachers I’ve met absolutely hate this system.

iirc last year’s yr11 and this year, FFT were based on year 7 CAT tests instead of year 2 SATs as there were no SATs for those cohorts. But every other year it’s based on SATs

They are a guideline to us teachers of there is any setting however we honestly take them with a pinch of salt and kids are taught to the test so it isn't accurate. We use our own assessment to set

More for the school and how well they are teaching so in my opinion they should be very low key, non stressful for the pupils

It's rather unlikely that more moved down than up, as they will need to keep the sets at about the same size. Most moves are swaps, especially in schools with no spare places.
(I can think of one exception, which was when the school I taught in had an influx of high ability kids due to a major employer relocation. There were several in the same year group, so in order to make space in the top set, we had to move others down. We did explain to parents that it was not that they were moving down, but that we were having to put the set boundaries in different places, and each set would now be working at slightly higher level.)

DS2 missed SATS due to Covid. I don't know what the secondary school did for year 7, it's all a bit of miserable blur tbh. Maybe they got a report from the primary schools?

For DS1 (now 26) I remember someone telling me that teachers could tell from which primary school their new cohort were from based on SATS. They could tell which school focussed on the SATS subjects to the detriment of other subjects. I think they all did the school's own assessment pretty early on in year 7.

DD2 didn't do Sats at all due to Covid. She probably would have done ok. She enjoyed primary school and thrived there.

For us it was pretty meaningless. As soon as she got to secondary school she became horribly anxious and could never attend regularly. She was diagnosed with AuADHD at 13. She managed to do a handful of GCSEs at home/online school. A meaningful statistic would be why so many kids do not meet their academic potential because secondary schools are a stressful bear pit. If teaching and environment carried on more in the same vein as primary school, how many more would reach their potential?

Half the posters are parents, confusing the OPs question with setting and claiming that they don’t matter because sets aren’t based on SATs.

The other half are secondary school teachers/leaders telling the OP that resource allocation in schools is largely based on enhancing progress measures, which are based on SATs, so definitely do matter.

It is true that year 6 SATs (and year 2 SATs and GCSEs) are used to measure the success of the school. But SATs results will have an impact on your child’s experience at secondary, because the school will throw everything it can at helping your child meet their FFT target, which is based on SATs.

Sets aren’t based on SATS, they’re based on baseline assessments. SATS are usually just a sense check in that respect.

Predicted grades are based on assessment data. However, FFT data (often used as a measure of what a child SHOULD achieve) is based on SATS. It’s usually a pretty accurate guide to outcomes at 16 (it can be a bit dodgy in subjects like mine, where there’s an element we don’t teach in school).

My DD did ok at SATs, but wasn’t in top sets at all. But she got the top grades in the school at GCSE (12 x grade 9). So important, but doesn’t mean too much.

SATs were largely a waste of time, in my opinion. So much of Y6 spent drilling the poor children in maths and English, with little focus on other subjects. My 10yo daughter regularly coming home upset that she was 3 or 4 marks off exceeding expectations. Teachers appeared to only be interested in the kids at the very top or bottom.
Luckily the secondary school we chose didn't set until Y8, based on their own assessments and my daughter is now thriving.

No, they aren't!

Schools will use internal assessment for setting etc, but the pathway of setting GCSE predictions comes from SATS.

That's what the schools are measured against. It doesn't necessarily mean anything to the kids, until they get their target grades but it is all based on sats

This, sums it up neatly!