SATs ? It's gobbledigok

[BeaLola]

I really have no idea at all ! However going hoping someone can explain the numbers to me ?
So DS has come home with a 1 page summary of SATS - if I have any questions I can book a 5 min spot for next week (!)

The good - I hope - it says Achieved Standard - the numbers though are low ?

This is a genuine post for someone who has never been through it trying to get her old grain to understand it !

English Grammar, Punctuation and Vocab -31
Spelling -11
Total - 42 and scaled = 102

English Reading Test - 28
Scaled = 100

Mathematics Arithmetic- 36
Reasoning 1 - 29

Reasoning 2 -29

Total maths 94
Scaled = 109

Thanks if you got this far

Your scaled score needs to be100 to be achieving the standard. They sacel them after they have marked them and 100 is the average mark. Everyone is supposed to achieve the average mark. Obviously this is impossible and the system is nonsense!

Don't worry about the details.
Your child scored 102, 100 & 109 which is meeting the required standard.
Which is absolutely fine, around average and a bit better for the maths.

100 is not the 'average'.
It is the 'required standard' and around 2/3rds generally reach it.

www.theschoolrun.com/understanding-sats-results
^^ this might help.

100= brilliant. Just where they are expected to be
100-115 = brilliant. Ahead of where they are expected to be.
85- 100= not quite there yet- will catch up next year.

85- 100= not quite there yet- will catch up next year.

I’ve seen this a few times on MN recently. We need to be more honest. Without intervention, these children will most likely not catch up. In 5 years time they will most likely not pass GCSE maths and English.

Parents need to understand this so that they can take appropriate action.

Indeed and the just around 100 students will have to work hard. The new GCSEs are intense and difficult. I have been marking the GCSE English Language. It is rigorous in a completely different way to SATs.

“I’ve seen this a few times on MN recently. We need to be more honest. Without intervention, these children will most likely not catch up.”
Sorry- yes, you’re absolutely right. There are so few parents of children in that bracket on Mumsnet asking for the results to be explainer to them that I forgot myself for a moment.....

I was going to comment on will catch up next year.
There is a reason why a child isn't at the required standard.

If it is rubbish primary or illness then the child may catch up when at a good secondary.

However if the child is just not that academic, or has SEN that will be hard to overcome, then they might well not, especially if you aren't proactive with intervention.

I just posted this on a secondary thread:

What might be instructive for parents wanting to understand SATs scores is to go to www.compare-school-performance.service.gov.uk and type in the name of the secondary school that your DC is going to.

Scroll down to ‘Results by pupil characteristics’
Then click on ‘Prior attainment’

Look at the percentage of low prior attainers who get a grade 4+ in English and maths. This is likely to be very, very low. Those will be the students who didn’t meet the expected standard at KS2.

The percentage of middle attainers who get a grade 4+ in English and maths is also likely to be lower than you expect. Not clear yet what will count as a ‘middle attainer’ in scaled scores, maybe up to 110.

Reading this with interest.

I've got a thread going on "children who didn't meet expectations" (as my username suggests). Those of you who are teachers - what's the chance of a child with dyslexia who flunked the reading comprehension test turning things round by GCSE (where he/she will get extra time - it's the time pressure that absolutely screws my DS)? And when you say low prior attainers - is this not meeting expectations in all three SATs tests, or is it flunking any single one of them?

Oh, and thanks for the instructions on how to navigate the government website, Noble - that's very helpful, and has helped me make a lot more sense of the figures for the school DS is going to.

The answer to the dyslexia question would be, it depends. I have taught students with dyslexia who have performed very well. I would say that the current GCSE English set up is not the friend of the dyslexic student. I would get the extra time in place straight away. And work specifically on understanding examination vocabulary. The questions are very specific in terms of what they want and this isn't clear from how it's phrased for all students but it is a skill which can be learnt.

That's certainly eye-opening noblegiraffe. My DC's SAT scores were a wide range of high and low. Looks like she should expect to fail maths GCSE and pass English then. (I wonder if she'd be ranked as a middle achiever for statistical purposes.)
Is there anything useful I can do? Should SATS results be a wake up call that you need to get a tutor? Would a tutor be able to turn things around?

Thanks grammar. That's really helpful. You've reminded me I need to get DS's dyslexia assessment up to date (the last one was age 7), so I'll get onto that immediately (just dug out his last assessment so I can take copies of it!)

Also great advice about the exams. I've got a good friend who's an English teacher, so hopefully she can show me some exam papers and talk me through the pitfalls.

I still read to DS every night (it's good fun now we're onto books that I actually enjoy, even some properly grown-up ones) - any hints on what else we could do to help with his English very gratefully received.

I'm really chuffed he managed to get the pass mark for SPAG, despite not being able to spell (though that's improved a lot over the course of this year, thanks to a great teacher in year 6).

As an added bit of info, I work in assessment. I can't comment on the maths says, but the reading assessment is pretty good at doing what it says on the tin (i.e. assessing a child's level of reading comprehension). The Spelling, grammar and punctuation test is, however, pure nonsense. The answer key is too restrictive, meaning sentences that are correct have to be marked as wrong. Some questions are asked in a very complicated way. The child may well be able to use the grammar point tested accurately in real life, but not on the test, as it's presented in such a convoluted way. Some "facts" are simply wrong (fronted adverbials do not necessarily have to be separated by a comma). Basically, it's a crap test and I wouldn't pay any attention to it whatsoever.

NotMet - I would get in touch with the new schools SENCO in September, chances are they will be doing reading and spelling tests in September and the results of these could be more interesting than the SATS. What you want to establish is how well can she read, and is her issue with decoding individual words or with comprehending longer text or both. I have taught children who arrived in year 7 pretty much unable to read and got them to average reading ability in a year, I've also had children arrive with below average reading and never catch up with their peers.

Extra time for GCSE can't be applied for before year 9 but the school may be prepared to grant extra time in tests and/or reader allowance for internal exams before that.

wonder the issue with DS is purely processing speed (used to be working memory when he was younger, as he struggled to retain all the phonemes in a polysyllabic word long enough to work out what the whole word was - but mercifully he seems to have got past that now).

He can read - just very slowly, and with a lot of effort. The issue is definitely not to do with not understanding the text, it's simply that he can't actually read the whole text and leave himself time to answer all the comprehension questions. So his mark is probably based on producing about 2/3 of the answers reasonably rather than all of them badly. (His teacher agrees about this btw, and reckons his actual reading ability is fine). He certainly asks quite acute questions about books I'm reading to him and has an annoying habit of picking at the plot holes/ character inconsistencies/ second guessing the plot being flagged up by hints the author is dropping . Oh, and critiquing literary style - JK Rowling was not up to his exacting standards... (He told me last night as he picked holes in yet another bit of the latest Alex Rider that we're on that it was my fault for reading him adult books and setting the bar too high...)

It's both funny and depressing - right from age 6, 7 (when we first got him tested with his then teacher's support - another fab primary teacher, we have been very lucky), there's been a huge mismatch between what he's capable of expressing orally and what happens on paper.

Sorry all, apologies, don't want to me-rail the thread - it's just it's so helpful getting info from teachers on this.

Our school tested DD at the start of y7 (at our request) and she was given extra time in tests from the start. She was then retested at the start of y9 to confirm concessions for GCSE.

My experience (now end y9), the G bit of SPaG really doesn't matter all that much at secondary, (though it is helpful for English to be able to pick out noun, adjective, verb and adverb).
What impacts more is ability to write in clearly understood sentences with basic punctuation, even if the spelling is a bit wobbly. At least then they can express their ideas across all the subjects.
There are marks for technical accuracy across all GCSEs (except maths? not sure), and DD is getting hit a bit by her poor spelling and stream of consciousness writing.

Certainly push for extra time in assessments then, it might be that he becomes more fluent with practice and extra time is enough, a significantly below average reading speed can qualify a student for a reader in exams (except English Language and MFL) which may be a better arrangement. You are doing absolutely the right thing by reading to him, lots of evidence that hearing stories is hugely beneficial for language development, empathy, vocabulary.. audio books are also good. Our county library service has an ebook service on an app called Borrow box which allows you to download books in a font called dyslexie which can be useful.

@Whathappenedtothelego

For progress 8 they average the reading and maths assessment score so that’s probably what they do here too. (Writing and spag don’t count).

Is it too late to turn things around? There’s 5 years to go so you should be able to have some impact, it does depend on why she got so low in her maths SATs. I’d hire a tutor (if you can afford it) at least to do an assessment of her strengths and weaknesses to try to figure out if there’s a specific issue that needs addressing.

Noblegiraffe thank you. We can't understand why she struggles so much with maths - score was 94, compared to 109 for reading, and 116 for Spg, and tbh maths score was better than expected. Credit to her fantastic teachers and TAs who have supported and encouraged all year. I'm starting to think it might be some kind of specific learning difficulty. Or is it fairly standard to be fairly able in other areas but struggle with maths?
A tutor would be a stretch, but we would go for it if it would be likely to mean the difference between pass and fail.

No that’s an unusual discrepancy. Her secondary school should be able to access the marks she got for each question on her SATs paper so it might be worth asking them if they can see anywhere obvious she’s losing her marks.

Is she numerate? Does she know her times tables?
What about the shape side of things? Can she visualise a cube and tell you how many edges it has? Can she draw and label a set of axes?

Yes, she knows her times tables off by heart. Up to 12, I think. But she would struggle to work out e.g. 3x13. I don't think it would occur to her to add 3 to 12x3, or to do 10x3 and 3x3. She'd write it down and try to work it out.
Visualising shapes, she probably could do. She's good at things like jigsaws. She could label an axis.

She's definitely worse at reasoning than arithmetic because according to her teacher when they did practice papers, she was averaging about half marks on the arithmetic and less than a quarter on the reasoning.