Past SATs papers set as Christmas holiday homework - is this normal?

[QOFE]

DD (10) was sent 2 of them to complete over the holidays. She also had to do a mini-project on this terms topic.

She did the mini project (she enjoyed it, worked hard, and did a great job of it too) but with visiting family and generally having some down time and enjoying the holiday, the SATs papers didn't get done.

I have this morning been told by her teacher that they are very important practise and she must do them tonight

Really? I though they weren't meant to make a big deal out of SATs? Seems a bit much to a) be piling on the pressure nearly 6 months in advance and b) setting them as Christmas holiday work FGS.

My point exactly, banana. If they don't know their stuff by Yr 6 then the school has failed them. The child is not there for the glorification of the school, the school is there to maximise the child's potential.

However, the blame must lie mostly with the politicians who refuse to trust teachers and schools to teach and who place more value on national and international league tables than on actual learning. It's tragic.

Pointy,
I agree. I don't think excessive homework is fair and I don't think holiday homework is fair, although many, many parents have complained when they get no holiday homework.

I do set SATs homework (my first one goes out on Thursday). My school policy is 30 minutes maths homework a week. This homework should about 30 minutes.

I can understand why some schools do more, I don't agree but in some schools the pressure for results in intolerable. Funnily enough much of this pressure comes from parents how judge schools on league tables and Ofsted reports.

Some posters have said that schools shouldn't need to cram. A bit of gentle revision is all that's needed. This seems fair, but this does depend on the targets being fair. If schools and teachers are set unrealistic targets then a bit of gentle revision won't be enough. I teach on Surrey. At various times of the year an official from Surrey CC has a meeting with my Head. He looks at numbers on a piece of paper and gives targets. These meetings are the key to how much pressure falls on your child. The pressure also relates to how accurate the KS1 results were. If they were a bit higher than they should have been the targets for your child will also be higher than they should be. And it's these targets, that can sometimes be unreasonable, that the poor Year six teacher has to cope with.

30 minutes a week for maths sounds totally fair and is about what my DD2 does in Yr6.

And you've put your finger right on the issue with the point about targets - the problem with targets is that they assume children learn in a nice, neat, linear and predictable fashion. Clearly they are not set by people who are either parents or teachers.

My heart sank when I read this thread. I'm a Year 6 teacher and I gave old Sat papers to take home for Christmas because the children wanted them instead of normal homework! We agreed they could do one or two questions a day to keep their brains ticking over. My pupils quite like doing old papers as they cover several different mathematical areas, whereas regular homework tends to focus on the previous week's learning.

I am quite vocal to the children about how I feel about Sats: They don't have to worry about them - that's my job. What they DO need to worry about is leaving Year 6 with the best knowledge, skills and attitude that they can manage. Sats pressure doesn't make that easy at times but we take a 'little and often, minimum pressure' approach and it seems to work quite well.

pointy- the targets are set by looking at all children in England, looking at the progress every child in the state system made, and taking average. Then children are expected to progress in a similar manner, some will be above, some below that curve.

Of course children do not progress in a neat linear fashion, but between 4 and 16 most get to a certain level.

banana - the secondary may well have re-tested the intake pupils, but they will still be judged at the end of KS4 (i.e. GCSE) on the individual pupils' progress from their End of KS2 testing. So re-testing does fuck all, except create discord between primary and secondary schools.

Wait for this..........my YEAR TWO (i.e. 6yo) DS had a past Sats paper sent home over Christmas

Vworp I understand that, but it does mean that if a school has a statistical blip, then they can get into all kinds of trouble OFSTED-wise. The year group above DD2 at her school was like that - a lot of children falling below the curve, having always been below the curve. DD2's group is the exact opposite. The problem is with the children are expected to progress in a similar manner part. Some don't. Sometimes you get a group where a large proportion don't, either because they are far below or far ahead. That's why we have lies, damned lies and statistics.

I do feel that KS2 testing is a particularly bad point on which to hang expectations, because almost immediately afterwards, puberty kicks in and children can change very radically.

pointy- I think you misunderstand.

If a child at 7 is working towards a level 1 (i.e. W) they will be expected to reach a broadly similar level as all the other children that were working towards level 1. If they are a 3 at KS1, they would be expected to make similar progress to all those achieving 3 at KS1. There's no real excuse for falling far behind because you're comparing like with like.

Re your point about KS2- the expected progress from KS2-KS4 is at a less steep rate than KS1 to KS2, so presumably that allows for some pubescent vacillation.

No, I understand you completely - however, that is still a statistical perspective. An individual child may have things happen in their lives - illness, parental divorce, bereavement - which impact on their life to such an extent that their school work suffers. That is something that targets cannot measure. That individual child will end up going into the stats as a failure of the school when there may be very good reasons beyond the school's control for things going wrong. Ultimately targets cannot drill down to an individual level, nor should they, but when looking at outcomes we have to bear in mind that we are talking about real people, not numbers.

In a small school with 20 children in a year group, a couple of divorces, a house move and a few redundancies in the family can cause immense upheaval. Even in a larger year group such events will have an impact on the stats.

This, in a nutshell, is why I think league tables are a blunt instrument at best and an irrelevance at worst.

My daughter, Y6, had no homework for the Xmas holiday. I wouldn't have minded a SATS paper or two mainly for her to see the format and have a go. Not for relentless practise.

Wait for this..........my YEAR TWO (i.e. 6yo) DS had a past Sats paper sent home over Christmas

I would hit the fucking roof. Stupid, ridiculous teacher.

This happens a lot at my friend's school. Children get SATs homework in year 2, no school plays for children in ks2 [year 3 upwards]. Excellent SATs results but I would hate my children to go there.

pointy- of course there will be exceptions (in my school- acquired brain injury, leukaemia, MH issues have all had a big impact in recent years), but if more than 2 or 3 children were in that situation, I would be concerned, particularly if it were my child not making adequate progress over a 4 year period.

Vorps I think we are all allowed to worry about lack of progress in our individual child. However, the problem arises when a school has a difficult year, gets raided by OFSTED and downgraded, parents lose faith in the school, teacher morale plummets - and that is because the school is judged on the statistics, and the people behind those statistics get forgotten.

I also think people tend to forget the importance of the home environment and are very quick to blame teachers completely for their child's lack of progress. Children are only in school for about 6 hours a day in primary, parents have to take responsibility too.

I have now personally been through OFSTED 6 times (most recently in Oct 2013). Prior to those inspections, I worked at LA level, supporting HTs going through OFSTED in presenting their Assessment information and evidence of progress made.

OFSTED do actually allow you to present your own evidence, and they allow you to explain extenuating circumstances such as individuals' progress being hampered by family circumstances, illness etc. You are able to remove children (outliers) from cohorts, and show how the group on the whole have progressed without them if you wish. Providing you can back up your assertions there is no problem with this.

I am not in the business of blaming anyone- if things are going awry, I want to put them right, not lay blame at someone's door. And yes- parent's involvement in their children's education is the key to their success, absolutely.

I'm sorry, Vworp, but with the tales of forced academisations opposed by parents in the primary sector, I have simply lost all faith in OFSTED. I am sure that there are many people of integrity working there, but events tell their own story. OFSTED is too politicised to be trustworthy. They blow with whatever political wind is prevailing at the time - they're doing it now, they did it under Labour.

You mention presenting assessment information and evidence - this obsession with data collection is part of the problem, IMO. Schools are so busy evidencing and justifying everything they do because they are not trusted to teach any more, and that is tragic. The pig must be weighed, but is it ever fed properly any more?

I'm not a teacher, I'm a concerned parent - and with every round of political meddling in education, I see things get worse instead of better.

With inspections cut to 2 days only, all they can go on is observation and evidence presented to them. I'm not sure what other methods/information you think they should be using.

I agree the standard of education is dropping , and I feel that it is wrong that there are not excellent schools available everywhere in the country, accessible to all.

What I do not see is the solution to this problem. Not without a radical societal shift in attitude to education, respect from young people for those who are senior to them (not just teachers, but senior pupils, parents, members of the community), increased parental involvement in the learning of their children (and I don't mean just farming that out to tutors ), responsibility for training the workforce shifted back onto employers rather than them griping that schools do not prepare people for work (no- school should be about thinking and learning, not being taught how to be a drone), and the removal of tuition fees for HE meaning it is accessible to all on a level playing field.

I like your radical shift thinking though. Can I add investing in excellent vocational education and linking that up with a radical shift in thinking away from the mindless worship of all things academic to the exclusion of all else?

2 days just isn't enough to do a thorough assessment of a school. That's the first thing that needs to change, the time allowed should double, or be a whole working week. Yes, I know that would cost more. It would be an investment in education.

We've totally hijacked the thread away from SATs homework over Christmas, OP. Sorry.

Quite feenie

pointy- I agree there is a desperate need for excellent vocational courses,- what is currently available is just not good enough, nor available in anywhere near the right numbers. Children are being expected to stay on until 18- it's entirely unfair to children that do not want to be in academic institutions, often form around age 14 that they should be required to remain there, nor is it right that they should not have access to appropriate, high quality provision.
(I think the figures for our LA were 280 apprenticeships per year... there are 15,000 in each cohort )

Sorry QOFE- this has deviated somewhat.

But now I realise it's you... you're asking if this is normal? I would never expect you to do what was conventional my dear!

There's a poster on here who has a DD who is an extremely able chocolatier, but she could not get on the right course without certain academic GCSEs. That is the kind of bollocks I am talking about - someone who has a truly amazing gift but can't develop it because the educational structure doesn't allow it.

There are so many young people out there with great untapped talents, but they get overlooked because they can't deal with Gothic literature or simultaneous equations. We should be working to train these young people up, equip them with solid business English and numeracy and send them out to conquer the world.

At the moment in many cases, apprenticeships are just a way for employers to get cheap labour. It was certainly that way when I worked in the field of supporting them way back when, and it was why I got out - an employer would take on a 16yo, train them up and pay them peanuts, then send them back on the dole at 18 and get another cheap 16yo. Obscene. The impression I got was that employers with integrity were in the minority.

Just had email from school to say that SATs papers will be set most weeks as homework for the next term....!

Don't mind the deviation at all btw. V interesting to get the perspective!