SATS ... useless poll .. answer yes or no please

[Twiglett]

Are SATS a good thing?

at year 2?
NO

at year 6?
NO

at year 9?
YES

No to all. All SATs have stopped here in Wales.

NO

NO

DON'T KNOW ENOUGH ABOUT THEM (although I suspect NO)

no

no

no

NO

NO

NO

No
No
No

The teachers should have some system to check childrens progress, so they can they cater for the individual needs of children.
I do think it needs be formalised so that all teachers do check all childrens progress, not just the ones that are causing trouble or have pushy parents. But I don't think the current system does any favours, because they teach to the test and concentrate on the borderline cases, rather than keeeping everyone moving along.

Yes, to them all

I think it's good to know how your child is getting on at school compared to the average (and good that the school knows how it is doing) and if it helps emphasise that there's a problem the child needs help with (which is what happened with dd and yr2 SATS), then all the better. I agree the results CAN be meaningless for all sorts of reasons (like tutoring etc.) but in my own personal opinion, I found them quite valuable and it enabled us to have a proper discussion with the teachers.

I think it's all parent driven anyway. How many of you have said NO but then judged a school by its SATS results?

FIS - But a good teacher would be able to assess your child and give you feedback on that without SATs tests. Isn't that what happened before SATs. Isn't that what happens in Wales, for instance, where they don't do SATs. SATs are purely for league tables.

but how do you know you have a good teacher? you can't guarantee that. And we get a few parents evenings a year and about 5-10 minutes of their time.

And who uses the league tables? Parents do!

No, no and no.

Our school uses loads of assessments anyway (NFER English and Maths, different reading tests, weekly spelling, weekly mental maths from Y3 etc) so they have raw and standardised scores for the children.

I think they are particularly insidious in Y6 because schools spend the whole first 2 terms just teaching to the tests, which means very little new learning is done, and the children find it stressful and dull.

I don't think that SATs results can indicate whether the teacher is good or not.
As far as league tables go - schools with good SATs results might just be good at cramming the kids prior to the SATs.
I think you have to do your own investigating and use your own judgement on those points.

yes, I must admit, I don't particularly think they NEED to be published (the results).

But I would like them to do a formal test that all children do so that I had an idea of how mine were getting on at school.

I think most schools do their own internal assessments anyway. They do them in non-sats years, too.

no
no
no

get them to do a hundred sums some easy some hard and a quick spelling test every Friday

instead of another ridiculous poster about saving water or healthy eating or whatever other faff they are wasting time on

yes, I agree juule but I'm saying whenever this comes up people scream 'no' to SATS then you go to a school thread and people are talking about the league tables.

yes to all. agree with foxy

apart from year nines of course

stuffitall- that's what my daughter's school does, and not one of the children is held back by not being tested to death! The head's analogy is that you don't pull a tree up all the time to see how it's growing.

Well not everyone. Some seem to value them but I feel they've just bought into the government propaganda about the stuff.

and most schools in yr2 don't even tell the children they are doing those tests - a lot of it is teacher assessment now anyway (rather than a formal test). I don't see any harm in it.

The only issue we saw with SATS were the other parents jumping up and down getting over excited about them .

I agree with you Twiglett.

No, No, Yes.

I've yet to meet an infants/primary teacher who doesn't know exactly where a child in the class is academically, without the need for a SATs exam. They teach the same children every day, all day (mostly) and they know their kids so well, I'm

I teach children for a maximum of 2 hours and 20 minutes a week, and at the moment I teach over 100 children (and I work part time, full time would be closer to 200). Secondary schools need more formal appraisal of standards. If it wasn't the SATs it would be a similar internal exam.

I just wish they would stop making the ks3 SATs exam have a reading age above the average chronological age of the children sitting the exam, as it penalises the less able readers.

Yes, yes, yes I don't see what the peoblem is at aall

I must admit, I don't really care . I'm so unphased by it all. We didn't get stressed about the SATS when dd did them and we won't when ds gets there. It was useful to see but that was it really.

It's interesting how against them most people are. I knew they weren't very popular, but had no idea how vehemently opposed to them folks were. I know in year 2 I didn't like them much and they seemed a bit pointless, but they are lower key now anyway. In year 6 I was annoyed our school did them as they'd already had the kids gee'd up once that year for senior entrance exam, but in the end they were a non-event - done instead of year-end exams and no fuss made. All the kids were far more interested in getting the end of year production together anyway.

Now I'm wondering if they were more palatable for me as our school doesn't publish the results? Are they really so much worse at other schools?

There's better ways of doing tests, even ones which allow a comparison between schools, than the way that SATs are carried out.

Up here ages 5 to 14 are covered by levels A to F for each subject. And when the teacher believes an individual child (or more often a group) are ready, they sit the test. Then assuming they've achieved that level they start working towards the next level.

Most teachers approach it in such a way that the children are barely even aware they're doing a "level test", and no-one gets worked up about it.

The schools have targets like "80% of pupils to reach Level B in reading by the end of P2", and their results in those sorts of terms allow you to make a comparison between schools (with the same provisos as league tables).