Disparity between teacher assessments and SATs results

[redskyatnight]

I'm just looking at the SATs results for the school that DS attends. (on Dof E website)

In 2012, in the SATs 74% of children achieved Level 4 (or above) in both English and maths

However, the teacher assessment figures show that 87% of children achieved Level 4 (or above) in maths and 88% of children achieved Level 4 (or above) in English.

Unless we assume that the children getting below Level 4 in maths are entirely different to those getting below Level 4 in English (which seems somewhat unlikely) these don't seem to add up. The teacher assessment results are substantially higher than the ones achieved in the SATs papers.

I had a quick look at some other local schools and the teacher assessment and SATs results are much more consistent.

DS's school does have a policy of not focusing on SATs - is this discrepancy due to children not being prepared for the formal tests? Or are the teacher assessments overestimated (seems unlikely, presumably there is some sort of internal "checking"). Any thoughts?

I don't see why it doesn't make sense. If you're worried about it all adding up to 100, it is more likely to be a rounding error than anything else, IME.

I've now found the more detailed breakdown and in the SATs 77% of children got Level 4 in English and 76% in Maths. Which is consistent with the 74% getting Level 4 in both.

But it's a fair bit lower than the teacher assessment scores. There are 101 children in the cohort so each child is about 1 percentage point. Just wondered if such a discrepancy was "normal" or suggested anything else.

Ime, lots of dyslexic and other SEN kids may fo badly at English, but often do well at maths ( my son was predicted a level 3 something for English and a level 5 maths) and I am sure there ar a few girls who are typically very good at English who may not do so well at maths.

Lots of kids do well n both, but it is not a given.

The teachers assess based on what they generally know that child can generally do, the test assesses using narrow marking scheme* from a small set of exams. The test is more rigorous but doesn't reflect what the child can generally do, just how they performed on those papers on that day, I reckon.

*It's worthwhile getting hold of one of the SAT papers, if you can, at least for math which is simpler to understand. See for yourself how prescriptive the marking scheme is.

I am little surprised at these figures. From monitoring our Y7 intakes over several years I have generally found that the Teacher Assessments are lower than the actual NCT (SATs) results (and probably much more realistic). This year is no exception.