How much would you set store by SATs results as indicator of good education?

[jasperc163]

DD is in a very small (mixed year group in class) village school. Good pastoral care and in the list of schools achieving 100% level 4 SATS thats just come out (on BBC website). However I still feel concerned about the lack of breath in the education she is getting (probably due to a mix of national curriculum restrictions, lack of resources in a small school, not enough emphasis on aspiring to be the best you can).

Is the curriculum focused on SATS really much more restrictive than what is offered in the independent sector? Is a good SATs score indicative of anything other than the fact that the school has decent teaching geared towards getting the children through the tests? Or am I being too negative?

Views appreciated?
thanks
Jasper

Magdaline - I agree FSM shouldn't matter. And I'm doing everything I can to help raise attainment in my childs school.

My DCs go to a tiny primary - they had 11 year 6s for the 2011 SATS - They show a 36% pass rate for 2011. The two previous years they were in the high 80s and then the year before that in the 30s again. But all the info about high / low achievers is suppressed due to the small numbers. I know for a fact that last years year 6s had a very high number of children with special needs. So only 4 achieved the expected level, but when you look into the teachers assessments, at least 3 were shown to be working at level 3 or below.

But the school is utterly brilliant and has much higher standards than the school that I moved DC from, that from the performance tables appears to be better.

In conclusion I take performance tables with a large pinch of salt!

The high correlation between FSM and SATS performance struck me when I looked at the tables today.

It made me cross at all the talk of 'chronic' underperformance as a result of poor teaching there was in the papers today. Most teachers work very hard!

ohlook, that's a good point you make about small numbers and statistics. A few kids either way can make a school like it's 'improving' or 'getting worse' but it's just inevitable with statistics.

"- not all kids from deprived backgrounds have parents who don't send their kids to school - in fatc, the ones I've spoken to want high levels of discipline and traditional teaching. It's the bleeding middle classes who can be so complacent"

Ofcourae you're right about children from disadvantaged backgrounds. But there are so many factors involved that makes things harder for poor kids. Overcrowding, poor diet, parents too busy or tired or worried to be as supportive as they would like to be. Parents whose own experience of school makes it difficult for them to engage with their children's school. And, frankly, it's much easier to be a supportive parent if you are better at reading and Maths than your child is.

There will always be a difference in academic attainment between children from better off backgrounds and children on FSMs, bar a minority of the exceptionally bright and driven, because the parents of children from better off backgrounds will always make sure there is a difference.

*Yuuule Thu 15-Dec-11 11:13:27

Sats results are a good indicator of how good a school is at getting children to pass sats.*

I agree with what Yuuule said. The primary my DCs went to was in an economically affluent area so has the kind of intake which would lead to expectations of good sats results. However, it is also close to lots of private schools and loses large numbers of pupils to the private sector between year 3 and year 6, many of whom are the brighter ones (the private schools are mostly selective). Some of those spaces are then taken up by children from all over the city, from a wide range of backgrounds and including quite a few with EAL needs.

The school is desperately keen to keep KS2 Sats performance in line with KS1 performance, despite the difference make-up of the classes. And also, I believe, they think that good KS2 Sats results will convince parents considering moving their children to private school that they will get an equally good education at the state primary.

Unfortunately they do this by spending most of year 6 drilling the children for Sats and not teaching anything new. Children who are seen as sure-fire level 5s are basically left to their own devices, while they concentrate on the borderline ones who can be brought up to level 4 or 5 with intensive preparation. DS was bored out of his mind for the whole year and didn't learn anything new. As a result, I was determined not to put DD through the same thing, so I moved her to one of the private schools at year 3.

I feel sorry for the state primary, because they have all sorts of budget and class size problems due to losing so many children during KS2, but what they are doing is completely counterproductive, in my view.

I was going to add parents who don't give a shit to the reasons for poor children doing badly. Bu then I remembered that rich parents can not gove q shit either. They can just pay people to give a surrogate shit.

SATS tell you nothing about the school, the teaching or the pastoral care. Tutors for SATS tell you a lot about the parents though.

exexpat - was your son achieving level 3s at the end of year 2? I've already been told by my DD's teacher she won't get level 3 at the end of year 2 so I suppose she's written off as a level 4 in year 6.
seeker - there are middle class parents working so much they have no time to help their kids at home.
For a success story, look at Michael Wilshaw's school in Hackney which defies all the odds and gets most of its kids (75% I think it is) 5 GCSEs. And there's a high proportion of FSM, EAL kids etc.

magdalene - your child will not be written off as a level 4.

She's predicted a level 4 which is not the same thing at all.

Look at the league tables for your school. It will show you what % of middle attainers (ie Level 2s) got a Level 5. That will show you what the odds of your child getting a L5 is.

It varies school to school. Could well be around 25%. So not that uncommon.

Find your school here

and look at the section titled KS2 test results and progress

And look at the row Percentage achieving Level 5 or above in both English and mathematics

And see how many middle attainers achieved a L5.

Schools I have just looked at it ranges from 8% - 28%, with average probably around 15%

Interesting looking at the FSM and English not first language
here in Southampton it is distorted by the fact that the Poles are generally fully employed

Yes, English not first language doesn't tell you much :)

Look at this school

English not first language - 100%
Percentage achieving Level 4 or above in both English and mathematics - 97%

That's a Sikh school with very, very low FSMs (4%).

The English Not First Language isn't very helpful - it lumps so many disparate groups together. In terms of the school above, I'd expect an affluent population who I'd strongly suspect all speak the same first language to do well.

It's not really comparable to schools with 40+ different languages spoken and 50% FSMs.

The FSMs appear to have gone down by a couple of % at my children's school. It's actually because there are now some families there who aren't entitled to any benefits, so are actually below that level of poverty .

I have a daughter in Y4 and found the math curriculum at the school pretty vague and the homework non-existent from Y1 onward. I've posted about our despair with the school's math's tuition and how we went over to mathsfactor elsewhere. In the last 5 years the schools SAT scores in maths have dropped ~5% a year so that instead of mid90s in maths L4+ - they're more like mid70s.

So my experience has been that the SATs have definitely picked up on the weakness - but long term. I think you can have amazingly good and bad years - so as a parent, I'd suggest looking at the last 5 years worth of SATs rather than just the previous year.

Our problem was a change of Head just before my DD1 (now in Y4) started - no government statistics can tell you in advance whether a new Head will be any good or not. We've also had a lot of retirements and new staff/ staff changes. Jury's still out on whether this Head is any good or not - reading score is improved but math is in the doldrums. To be fair to school - although they don't take questions/ complaints very well - ultimately, they do seem to take it on board. Just hard to tell if improvements are for forthcoming Ofsted visit (my understanding is if a school scores outstanding Ofsted won't come again) or if they genuinely care about improving standards of teaching/ learning for the children's benefit.

magdelene - we weren't back in the UK until he was in year 4, so didn't do KS1 Sats but I'm pretty sure he would have been getting level 3s (DD did), except that his handwriting was dreadful.

That was the one thing he really needed to work on at school but he got no help at all with it because it was easier for them to get his Sats scripts transcribed than to help him improve. He is slightly dyspraxic, hadn't learnt cursive script at his old international school, but when he arrived in the UK, they had already done cursive so he was just expected to pick it up. His handwriting is still pretty illegible now he's 13.

Indigobell - my DD is in the second top group but the school have still written her off because she's a quiet child. I am not bothered; she'll shine at secondary school. We'll move to get her into a nice school.