SATs effort

[FireFly81]

My 7 year old DS brought home a SATs work book yesterday and said they had used that as a practice and had then done the real tests in the last few days. I looked through the booklet and it was pretty bad, his writing was terrible (almost unreadable), almost all words were spelt wrongly, sentances unfinished and scribbles were words should be. The maths pages were similar, wrong sums where it was obvious he hadnt even tried, unreadable scribbles instead of answers and a whole section undone. It was just blatently obvious that he had not tried with it at all . He is very intelligent and I know full well he could have done better and am now worried that he has done the same on the real tests.

What will happen if he has?

Nothing will happen. For a start SATs are supposed to be a test of the school not the child. I'll bet he did better than that in the 'real' ones anyway. My eldest is an nightmare in class 'so laid-back he's horizontal' according to his teacher , never volunteers an answer, never finishes a piece of work, very messy....but he generally does OK on the SATs...it somehow seems to concentrate the mind!! More importantly if your DS does OK in class the teacher will be more interested in his normal work than the SATs.

The tests don't matter. Indeed, it is in the school's interests if the children don't do too well as the Year 2 SATs are not published but the Year 6 value added results (how well the children have improved between the Year 2 SATs and the Year 6 SATs) are. I'm in the same boat with my son in Year 2 so I sympathise.

I went to a meeting about year 2 SATS where the teachers said "SATS will tell you or us nothing about your child that you/we don't already know". I so agree - they are a total waste of space.

DD did really badly in her SATS recently, I was really frustrated as her class work isn't okay but she seemed to just panic during the test. I tried not to let it bother me, the teacher knows what DD is capable of from her class work so I agree that the SATS don't prove anything.

Schools are now allowed to take into account the work the children do over the whole year, not just how they perform on one test, in one day.

That can go both ways, sometimes children score really well in their sats (through multiple choice answers etc) which is not a true reflection of their ability and vice versa. As long as there is evidence to back up a schools final decision of what level a child is working at, then it doesn't matter whether that evidence are sat papers or a selection of annotated (unaided) work from throughout the year.

I should have said in year 2! Not in year 6.