Upcoming SATS and constant testing of children

[cantfindamnnickname]

DS is 11 in year 6 - for the last half of last term and this term and presumably until the SATS the teacher is constantly giving them SATS papers to do, they are literally doing 2 or 3 tests every day and the pressure is immense.

I am not impressed and think its ridiculous - I have raised this issue with the Head and she agrees that its not the way to do it - she has only been there since January however and is making lots of changes to the school so I think she is reluctant to challenge this at the moment.

I do not want DS under this much pressure - is there any guidance from Ofsted about SATS or best practice so that i can go to head and force her to deal with the issue now?

"There isn't really anything to revise, is there? If they've been well taught, it's what they've been learning for the last 7 years."

I think therein lies the rub, Singergirl.

We had the same experience last year as you are having this year - SATS were no big deal. I am also a governor and I know who hard the school has been working to ensure that children are being developed evenly over the whole of the 4 years of the juniors rather than coasting in yr 3 and 4 and cramming in yr 5 and 6. Our HT says it wasn't just our school that did that but it was a recognised pattern in a lot of schools. If you do teach well over the whole of the school then Yr 6 should be a doddle. If you don't then I suspect this is where you get all the horror stories of children being pressurised and stressed. That is not fair on the children and you would hope that the schools would cotton on to this as a bad practice and change like ours has done but apparently not. They just keep complaining about how awful SATs are and rather than change their ways and try to make the whole process easier for everybody.

TWO obvious alternatives:

1. don't publish the end of y6 results. Just like they don't publish the mid-year assessments for y3, y4 or y5. They still get assessed in a very SATs like way many times in those years, info which goes into child's records & sometimes gets told you on parents' eve, just that the results are not published, so they are not as stressful tests to all.

2. use the secondary CAT results to reflect back on primary schools. Publish those instead if desired. One problem of this is those who went to indie schools instead (tend to be extremes both way), and a minority of state secondaries that don't do CATs (but most do).

I prefer 1), but 2) is still better than current system. They could even do 1)+2).
Politicians & spin doctors insist that "the public" want published y6 results. That part baffles me, too. I've never met anyone irl & barely anyone online that likes them being published.

ampere said
nonastemia- do you not think that schools find past SATS papers useful as a level to aim at, too? Your one-liner about how glad you are that you've pulled your DC out of the system to homeschool having just read 3 pages of discussion about SATS seems to imply that SATS can only bring about stress, upset and anxiety, no acknowledgement that they can also be a useful measure of a DC's acheivement. There was a hint of 'smug' about it that I rose to.

I'm sure schools do find it useful to aim for that too. I was responding to the OP, who said her DC's school is drilling them with several SATs papers a day. Thinking that this is unreasonable is not the same thing as saying what you've said above, is it? If you think I'm being smug because I'm I'm glad my DD won't be subject to what the OP described, then I suggest that says more about you than me.

Bertha said
NonAtemia - I think you did say something about the 'terrible system' even if you didn't use those 2 words.

I was commenting on the situation described by the OP, not on the concept of SATs or the terribleness of the education system. But clearly my comment isn't valid if my child isn't currently at school.

For a lot of schools there isn't the intense pressure and no drilling. It really is no big deal for some children and if there had been any hint of drilling and extra homework I would have resisted that as much as possible as a parent. Well that's great, good for you.

Haven't read the whole thread yet, but can you not just refuse to allow your child to do all the tests? (i.e. request that they do a reduced number of tests). So as not to create extra work for the teacher, you could always bring in your own alternative materials so that your son can sit and read/ do something else quietly while his friends are being tested. Is this too libertarian an approach for the state school system? Am I going to get myself into trouble with this attitude in years to come?!

My kids are not yet old enough for SATs but as a former teacher I have plenty of experience of training students for exams. That is exactly what it is: exam training, not proper teaching/ learning. Exams are very useful in the right context, of course they are, but IMO the main focus of primary school should be to develop key skills and engender self-confidence and a love of learning. Heavy-handed exam prep achieves none of these goals.

Maybe the point of Y6 SATs is to make Y7 seem a barrel of laughs in comparison...

It's a conspiracy, clearly. And secondary school teachers are in on it.

Out of interest, how do CATs and SATs compare? I know nothing about CATs.

You know, I often wonder whether the children are actually as bothered as parents think they are. My ds is in year 6. They re currently doing a practice SATS paper every day- that's 45 minutes, I think- either in Maths or English. He brought home a SATS pack over the Easter holidays- 10 minutes a day and a promise of extra playtime for everyone who brought the pack back completed. It was basically doing 10 minutes of Maths practice every day- not sure that's particularly stressful or arduous!

I would love to have some evidence for these stories of sick children being dragged into school to do SATS- in my experience they always happen to "a friend of a friend's child"!

I'm not against testing per se and think that 11 is a good age to do it - it's just how loaded the SATs issue has become. They're used to judge a school and reflected in the horror that is school league tables. I don't think the children suffer on the whole (uness undue pressure is put on them by teachers and parents stressing about the whole thing) and it's right, they should be getting to grips with being tested at this age. But in my experience secondary schools pay very little attention to KS2 sats results. A secondary deputy head I know says they are the bane of his life - he knows for a fact that 3 out of the 4 primary feeder schools 'cheat' on their SATs results by 'helping' some children with the answers, to big up the school to parents and league tables, which in turn feed into the secondary school's GCSE targets, which the teachers at the new school quickly realise the kids don't have a lot of chance of achieving. So that in turn makes the secondary look like a failure, when in reality they are doing their best.

SATs have skewed the whole education process and narrowed down the meaning of 'success', creating baggage which kids and teachers spend the next few years trying to live up to or unpick.

MayaAngelCool - the head at our primary school was really upset because one parent refused to let their child take part in KS2 SATs, thus 'cheating' the school out of a 100% pass rate at Level 4+ (each child represented about 4% of the total).

explanation of CATs.
They could be expanded slightly to more directly address maths, too.
There's a lot I don't know about CATs, but I do know it's expensive to have CATs AND SATs.

Wordsmith - I wasn't suggesting the child avoids the exams; it's the excessive testing regime which I've said the parents should protest against.

That said, do they still do SATS at age 7? That I do have a problem with, and will not want my children to do them.

Maya - you and your children won't know you are doing them at 7 unless the school choses to tell you. You do hear the odd story of infant schools behaving badly but mostly it is normal teacher assessment that is an on-going part of teaching that age group any wayl.

*if you sit mid-level stream GCSE maths you are sitting a paper for which you CAN NOT get higher than C no matter how bright you are!.

If you're that bright, you'd be put in for the Higher paper and be able to get an A*

I was in this positiion and was told that I could take the higher paper in addition to the the capped one that the rest of my set were taking. However being the disaffected teenager that I was, I was reluctant to take any more exams and declined to take the higher paper. Would you still need to take 2 papers in this situation? My GCSE's were 20 years ago.

I do think it is very important that children are in the right set, the top set only had to take one exam.

My Ds was assessed as L1 in y2. He is now y6 and his teacher says he is working at L5. I think this is a huge leap and Ds is feeling under pressure. His teacher keeps saying "Come on, let's go for a 5!" I know that Ds will be gutted if he 'just' gets L4.

They are doing practice papers every day and were given a 12 week revision programme to complete at home on top of regular homework. (1 hr a night)

At parents evening his teacher said directly to him, "I'm sure your parents would like you to go to university, so you really need to knuckle down this term. You don't want to let them down, and you don't want to let yourself down!"

I told his teacher, in front of Ds, that I couldn't care less what level he got. I said I was more interested in how he was getting on socially, and if he was enthusiastic and polite. Being told he has a great attitude and good friends is far more important to us.

I also told his teacher that we hadn't even thought about university, you know, seeing as HE'S ELEVEN!

My 2 DS's have been having SATs paper since January, and the school has given their class extra tuition for 1hr 3 days a week since February. This has been funded by the County Council, as the county was going down in the league tables! This has ment that other afterschool activities have had to be forgone in favour of these extra hours cramming! I said I was not happy with this, but it was made clear that the kids were expected to go, and because of this, my conforming kids got upset when I said they didn't have to go! . They have therefore had so far 30 extra hours schooling for these blasted SATs, with only another 6hrs to go, thank God.

wiggly the foundation and higher papers are now sat at the same time so you can't be entered for both. With modular, you could sit a mix of foundation and higher modules to really fine tune per pupil to get the best results, but the government obviously has scrapped all that. However, students should still be sitting a mock close to the real exam and the tier of entry decided from that rather than be pre-determined from setting in Y10.

I didn't mind my DDs taking sats as it was just a couple of days out of their normal routine. I think they may have had a couple of practice papers just to familiarise themselves with test layout. It seems the problem lies with the dreaded league tables and the schools desire to push themselves up to the top with no regard to the children. So get rid of the league tables and keep sats. They are a handy as a guide to see how your child is doing compared to their peers. From what I've heard secondary schools pay scant notice to their incoming pupils Y6 test results.

" From what I've heard secondary schools pay scant notice to their incoming pupils Y6 test results."

The are many secondary schools that pay a lot of attention to them- like the one my ds is going to in September. They are streamed on day 1 according to their SATS. So check your child's destination school before being too relaxed about SATS.

My 2 DS's have been having SATs paper since January, and the school has given their class extra tuition for 1hr 3 days a week since February. This has been funded by the County Council, as the county was going down in the league tables! This has ment that other afterschool activities have had to be forgone in favour of these extra hours cramming! I said I was not happy with this, but it was made clear that the kids were expected to go, and because of this, my conforming kids got upset when I said they didn't have to go! sad. They have therefore had so far 30 extra hours schooling for these blasted SATs, with only another 6hrs to go, thank God.

God Bubby I'd be furious at this!

I thought it was more common for secondary schools to use a variety of assessment tools to 'band' children. Know that the ones in DS's class who are going to the local comps have to go into their secondary-schools-to-be on a Saturday to have tests which will be used to stream/band them. Obviously they have learned the hard way that the SATS results don't necessarily reflect the child's natural abilities....

DS is totally fine about the SATS, but after all the selective school exams (and a guaranteed super-selective place) he did in the Autumn Term, the SATS are not a big deal. Have been trying to encourage him to do his best though, nevertheless!

DS's school tries not to make a huge issue of them thankfully but know it's not the same at other local schools ;-(.

Honestly, the secondary school ds is going to uses SATS and nothing but SATS. I don't know what other schools do, but that's what this one does. And I assume it's not the only one.

Don't disbelieve you Seeker - it's just it in no way necessarily reflects the abilities of a child (particularly one who is exam/pressure phobic).

Know that at Graveney, they use four different ways to assess a child's ability - the Wandsworth Test score, SATS results, interview and HT reports from primary school!

That is as maybe, but do they use 4 different ways to test the DC at GCSE? At A level? At degree?

Even at B.Tech?

No.

As far as I remember degrees don't just rely on exams and as far as I have heard, GCSE's include an awful lot of course-work - that's the equivalent of different ways of testing....

There seems to be some underlying hostility here and just curious to know what it's about....?

"That is as maybe, but do they use 4 different ways to test the DC at GCSE? At A level? At degree?"

Um - yes? I don't have any direct experience because I did O-levels, but I thought GCSE's were all about course work? Certainly many (most?) degrees are based on course work and disertations as well as final exams.

Even when I was at school teachers complained that the O-level and A-level year were basically revision years, not years when you actually learnt anything - is it a good thing that we now also waste time on SATS?

Also, as far as I remember (and maybe it is different nowadays?) you can retake public exams and get a better grade.

I have this ground breaking idea - in primary school, if we want to assess somebody, lets maybe train somebody for 4 years, let them spend maybe a year with a child, and then perhaps get their feedback? We could call these people teachers?

Thats fine if the teachers are good. Not so fine if they aren't. Teacher assessment isn't fool proof, nor is it free from the the pressures of making the school or the teacher look good.