SATS who are they for?

[jacobibatoli]

dc has just finished doing SATS, spent most of the year practicing for SATS tests all year (or seemed like most of it)
not really learning anything new just practice, practice.....
end result good SATS results but for who? (the kids, the primary school, the secondary school or the next batch of prospective primary school parents?)
what does the secondary school do?
ignore them, as they are skewed results
so the secondary schools do CAT tests and stream according to those results
so my question is who are SATS for?
they do not benefit my dc
they do bot benefit the secondary school because the results are so skewed?

Toomamyhouseguests there re very few 11+ areas in the UK so not representative of the national situation

pupils with parents who seriously support learning at home are the ones that achieve.
There is heaps of evidence for this, in LEAs without and with the 11+

Parental support, or lack of it, is the game changer.

The SATs were first introduced back in the 80s - in response to shocking statistics about the number of children leaving primary schools with poor reading and writing and going on to achieve very little at secondary, and ending up NEET.

The logic behind them was that the tests would make teachers push kids harder to do well in the tests. It did not work. So back in 1998 Labour changed the tests and the results improved dramatically for a couple of years, supposedly proving how wonderful their educational policies were.

Since then there have been minor improvements, but regression too, and the government has resorted to labelling schools as 'failing' if too many kids don't achieve the right level. - So the tests are really testing schools and their teachers.

Given that success in them depends very heavily
a) on home support (or the ability to buy it)
and
b) the ability children are born with
they are a bit insane.

PS Overall literacy standards are still as bad as they were when the tests were first introduced.

Of course parental support give ahuge advantage! The point is it isn't limited to 11+ areas.

Of course it is not limited to 11+ areas. But if you live in the London-orb where people are competing for SS grammar or private schools, or a county (I count 17 in England) that still with Grammar schools, or Northern Ireland, there is a big, outside incentive for parents to make an extra push at the end of primary.

And in non 11+ areas there is competition for children to get places in high achieving secondary schools and places in the top sets. In many schools this is based on KS2 test results and in all state secondary schools GCSE targets are based on KS2 results.