Y6 SATS - what are they for??

[suedonim]

So, what are they for? Educate me, please! Dd2 is at an international British curriculum school and they are doing 'mock' SATS before the real thing in ?May. Dd already has a place for September as will, I imagine, most of her peers. So this seems to be a matter of treading water. Is there anything positive to be said for SATS?

No
Seriously, the original intent seemed good, to actually quantify the progress children made between reception and y6, and assess whether the child was reaching the expected level. However, as concerned parents, we then expected to see this information as we believed it would give us another method of checking how 'good' a school was.

This resulted in the league tables. Large sections of schools now see the league tables as a competition, and as such put the children under immense pressure to achive a certain level. DDs school has been doing sats revision since Jan, and the pressure is on the get L5, L4 is not classed as good enough.

DD has put a lot of effort into passing the entrance exam for independant school, so frankly I don't give a stuff what she gets in her sats. I believe they are used in some state secondaries for streaming though.

"Is there anything positive to be said for SATS?"
I don't think so, really.

"What are they for?"
I thought they were for the school. Sats results decide the placement of the school in the league tables.

My dc have mostly been educated in Scotland where they don't have SATS so it seems like a monumental waste of time. Dd isn't concerned about doing them, she thinks they're fun, but it makes me sad to think that this is going on all over England when children could be learning something else.

Scotland does have Levels but they are not talked about by parents anything like as much as sats seem to be.

Sats really seem to be misused.

Those of us with pre sats older children may remember DC's going through primary school and not really knowing what was going on. Parents evenings would be full of doing fine, getting on well as would reports - everything very positive.

DC was in the first year of year 6 sats and I had been led to believe that he was doing very well and was very bright (and considering grammar school or independent with view to a scholarship place but never got round to it). We came down earth very rapidly when sats (both exam and teacher assessment) results came out and he had not reached the level 4 expected for year 6 in any subject.
I was so angry that the school had not let me know earlier on so he was sufficiently prepared for secondary school. Fortunately his secondary school did a lot of remedial work with him (and many others from his primary school which had been living on past glories)

At least the thought of SATs makes sure that the primary schools are doing their jobs properly and letting parents know early enough and truthfully if there is a problem.

I'm inclined to agree with Confusedandignorant. We've always found it difficult to get a good ideaa of how DS2 was progressing at school. The reports are vague, teachers don't like to admit if a child has difficulties. On the other hand, Y6 seems to be entirely geared to getting the best results possible for the school with these tests (early morning extra classes, dubious methods of invigilating during the tests). The results are used in our local state secondary school when they divide up the tutor groups (so there is a good mix of abilities) and to some extent as evidence for setting - though the school does its own tests.

I agree with confusedandignorant. The SATs do make the primary schools try to get all their pupils to a standard which will enable them to survive secondary school, so I'd be in favour of keeping them.

I do wish they wouldn't leave most of that effort to Year 6 though. Furthermore, there's no need to get children into really bad panicky obsessive exam revision habits - they're not good for anyone.

There are also problems for those who easily meet Level 5 and spend the year very under-challenged.

suedonim, your daughter's results probably won't affect her very much, as others have said.

....and the secondary school will use sats to identify any difficulties which can be worked on.

The threat of early morning booster classes has encouraged DS to work hard in year 5 as he has realised that if he is not at 3a/4c at the end of this year he will have to do early morning/after school classes and miss the football clubs and not get in the team

That is the other problem those who are way above level 5 there is the glass ceiling.

The year 9 sats have an option for extension work so the children can do a project or investigation, it would be nice if the year 6 children could do a similar thing as part of their sats but very few schools offer this

i remember being given year 6 sats results, with another page extraplolating possible gces grades from it.
remember thinking what a load of crap

they use sats in conjunction with other tests in year 7 (cats) to predict GCSE results and statistically there is a good correlation (okay there will always be exceptions - late developers and teenage traumas)

That's a good point, Confusedandignorant, with Sats picking up your ds's problems and enabling you to do something about it.

I guess my issue is with the amount of time they take up and the hysteria that they generate. Dd has just given me her timetable for mock Sats. She'll spend more than 6 hours this week on Sats which, given that today is a public holiday in Nigeria, leaves precious little time for actually learning anything.

Scotland indeed does have Levels, as Pointydog says, but they are so unobtrusive that I have never heard another parent mention them.

bear in mind that they are in the three basic areas so the maths covers everything they should have done including mental arithmetic and non calculator work, english includes comprehension, spelling, reading and writing and the science covers all areas and one advantage is that they are in may leaving quite a few weeks for sport, games, art, drama and saying goodbye

I'm surprised about the glass ceiling because when dd1 was in yr6 her maths group worked on level 5-7 papers in the run up to the sats.

Although I don't like sats I agree that they are a rough indicator that your child is on target. I.e. a level 3 at ks1 should expect level 5 at ks2. If that child is not on target to reach high 4s at the end of year 5 then you should ask the school why.

They are used to 'show' secondary which level the child is at when they come up.

I have to say though that the levels at primary are never right. This is due to a few things. The kids are coached and also that the papers are obviously so much easier than the end of KS3 papers and yet the kids are marked on the same level indicators.

It sounds complicated but it isn't actually.

As teachers at secondary we hated the KS2 SATS as they were always wrong when you took them on the level indicators that WE used which were meant to be the same as primary ie a level 5 kid in primary should have been the same as a level 5 kid in secondary BUT when you think that most of the B set at GCSE were level 5's at KS3 this tends to make a mockery of the system somehow. I always used to say that no way could a child in year 7 who had achieved level 5 do the same work as the year 10B set and yet they had been put on the same level by the SATS. In reality if they really were a level 5 then they should be capable of the same work. I don't know if I've expressed myself clearly or not here

If any school has a 'glass ceiling' above which no children can rise, than that school is failing those children.

I cannot believe all English primary schools cannot stretch a child above a prescribed level. That would be a sad state of affairs.

Yes, sue, unobtrusive, that's the right word. I don't know of parents who discuss their child's levels with other parents (although some must dig).

That's sort of how it was explained to me, Pixiefish. I queried how at the end of year 8 my ds was predicted level 5 at end of ks3 when he had left primary 2 years earlier on level 5. I was being told how he was doing excellent work but looking at his sats levels he appeared to have stood still. I was also told that because of the intense coaching prior to the sats a lot of what is covered isn't retained by a lot of the children which is why secondary schools prefer to do their own tests before streaming.
I can understand how sats should work but they don't seem to be being used in the way they should be.

Why does all this intense coaching go on?

I don't get it.

And to be fair, I think secondary schools will always want to make their own minds up about streaming, unless we ever reach a day where primary testing is marked externally.

I thought sats were externally marked at ks2. There is also a teacher assessed grade.

They are externally marked BUT to assess properly on the same scale of levels you need to have the same papers which you cannot have. Common sense tells anyone that most year 9 children will be more able than most (but not all obviously) year 6 children.

ah!

So externally marked but don't correspond to secondary? That seems odd.

ANy Welsh input? Haven't they just got rid of your sats?

We take on board SATs results but we also give kids our own tests part way into the first term.

We put the two together, and also add our own classroom assessment of how well the child is doing (useful if they get freaked out by tests).

To a degree the children are either end of the scale are most reliably picked up.....do we know which kids might need help that is a little 'outside the norm'.

We also get kids who appear to be making little progress in KS3, where in actual fact they are replacing 'coaching' with 'understanding'. And I'm not having a pop at Primary teachers. Goodness knows I have to do much the same thing myself on times

Welsh Sats have gone but have been replaced by folios which are Teacher Assessed. Still down to these blardy levels though.

So sort of the same as sats but internally assessed?Is that what you mean, pixie?