Who else is gearing up for SATS?

[milliways]

My DD13 is back at school tomorrow and has spent loads of these hols revising. Yr9 SATS start in May but mocks etc start straight away. I know options have to be chosen in next few months but the amount of homework this yr has already been minimum 2hrs per night - usually more. She is in a good state school and is very motivated but the pressure on them seems v.much worse than at YR6. Anyone else going through same?

ANOTHER teacher adding a 'Bllcks to SATS!' voice here - don't worry about them. Really, really don't. My (brightish & biddable) middle set Year 9 group ALL got Level 5s last year, except for a couple of persistent non-attenders & another 2 who should never have been in middle set. It's all a nonsense - I know what the mark scheme says they should've been able to do for that grade, & I know damn well that half of them weren't up to that standard.

As a department, we give one (similar to SATs) assessment per term at KS3. That's enough to ensure they are familiar with the format of the paper & don't fail to do themselves justice because they freak out when confronted by an 'exam' - anymore is unnecessary in my opinion. You don't fatten t'pig by weighing it, as one of my colleague's is fond of saying!

They are basically a means a) to beat up teachers & b) to enable the government to claim standards are rising year on year (but that's a whole different thread!).

Don't dignify the blasted things by worrying about them!

I told my stepdaughter not to worry about SATS as they weren't testing the children, just the teachers and the schools and they weren't important for her future. I think the amount of pressure on kids is just shocking.

The only thing I'd add (apart from 'aaaaargh, how did that apostrophe typo creep in!' ) is that many schools (ours included) use SATs as a starting point when setting groups for GCSEs.

It's worth being vigilant at THAT point in case your child winds up in the wrong set - which could mean 2 important years of being taught at the wrong level.

Carrie, do you happen to know when Level 5 became the standard for Y9? When SATs started, the target was supposed to be Level 2 in Y2, Level 4 in Y6 and Level 6 in Y9. Quite a lot of children seem to get Level 5 in Y6 too these days.

Has the requirement been lowered just to make sure they all hit it? Or is it that a Y6 child's Level 5 is different from a Y9 child's Level 5?

I don't know when they changed it Jan, no!

I do know there's absolutely NO correlation (in English at least) between the descriptors of Level 5 performance in secondary school students, & a Level 5 attained in Year 6 - as I explain to aggrieved parents of Year 7s every bloomin' year after the first assessed piece of work .

The whole thing's a mess. The grade descriptors are online somewhere...

That pretty much defeats the object then, doesn't it, Carrie? All the levels were supposed to be directly comparable so that value-added could be fairly measured? What a huge waste of time and effort and money and shredded nerves. Gah!

Yep! Total waste of time!

There's a report on 2004's Year 9 English test here if anyone is feeling strong enough to wade through it - this is sort of thing we're inflicting on them!

Well I did start reading it, but rapidly lost the will to live...how often do you get things like that? Are you supposed to read them all carefully?

READ them? We're supposed to have meetings where we go through them point by point!

You could try KS3 English for some light relief if you like...