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

[sitlux]

PS. The writing scores never get communicated to parents, as they are made up - everyone in GDS gets 113, everyone in EXS gets 103 and so on. They only use these for progress 8 calculations and for banding children in the "high standard" category.

[noblegiraffe]

Ah I meant progress 8 at secondary school, that definitely only uses KS2 reading and maths.

Didn’t realise they did progress 8 from KS1 to 2. How utterly moronic given the size of primary cohorts.

[OhNoIDontLikeIt]

noble, so if the child had very high scaled score for ks2 sats for both reading and maths, the child will have very high targets for GCSE, and school will put effort into the child achieving it, even the actual secondary isn't very academic?

[sitlux]

Ah ok, yes I find it a bit odd they would calculate things differently, so a lot of weight on Writing in primary, but then in Secondary it's ignored.

@OhNoIDontLikeIt from what I've seen yes that is the case, secondary schools will set high targets for those with SATs >110. In our case, the school DD is going to bands them in 4 target groups / flight paths, with scores >110 expected to get 7,8,9 in their GCSE.

They even have fine grading within the 4 bands: lower, middle, upper. So for instance the highest band is "Mastering", with 3 fine bands:

Band / KS2 SATs / Expected GCSE:
118-120 / Upper / 9
115-117 / Middle / 8
112-114 / Lower / 7

Some secondaries will also create ability sets - initially based on KS2 scores, which they will review termly based on CATS and other school internal assessments.

[frogsoup]

Sitlux that's interesting, the secondary school DD is about to go to said they pay no attention whatsoever to sats and do their own assessments. They don't set at all either, so they say. Are they being economical with the truth?

[Feenie]

Yes - the DfE set the school targets based on their SAT results which they have to meet. That’s their accountability measure.

[noblegiraffe]

the child will have very high targets for GCSE, and school will put effort into the child achieving it, even the actual secondary isn't very academic?

Technically yes, the child will have to get high GCSE results to avoid negative progress 8, and it’s in the school’s interests to facilitate this. The whole idea of Progress 8 was to make every child’s progress matter.

Progress 8 is an average across the whole of Y11 in the school though, so the individual effect of one child not doing as well as they should is massively watered down if the rest of the year group do well.

The DfE don’t set targets that the child has to meet (schools can and usually do pay private companies to generate targets for them), what the DfE do is look at how the kids actually did in the exams and compare them to similar children.

[OhNoIDontLikeIt]

Thank you!

[YogaDrone]

Got DS's SATs results in his report today. Thank you to PP for theschoolrun.com link which has allowed me to work out the acronyms

With his personal results there is also a page for the school overall and this is the part I don't fully understand.

It says "Combined REA, WRI, MAT (WRI is teacher assessed)" then has a %
This % is lower than each of the results for reading, writing and maths achieved standard %
E.g. mean average of Achieved Standard for REA, WRI & MAT is 75% yet Combined % is 65%

How does this make sense? Am I reading it incorrectly? Any help gratefully received

[Mumski45]

The combined score will be lower because it represented the inner of children that passed all four subjects.

[spanieleyes]

There will be children who achieved reading but not writing, or writing but not maths, or reading and maths but not writing or any other combination you can come up with . The combined percentage shows you the children who achieved expected in reading, writing and maths. This is generally lower ( and can never be higher!) than the individual percentages for each subject.

[YogaDrone]

Ah, okay. I think I understand. Thank you both!

[spanieleyes]

So Fred gets reading, writing and maths
George gets reading and maths but not writing
Arthur gets reading and writing but not maths
Dave gets reading and maths but not writing

Reading score is 100% as everyone achieved it
Writing score is 50% as 2 achieved it
Maths score is 75% as 3 children achieved it.
Combined score is 25% as only Fred scored all 3!

[spanieleyes]

Sorry, cross posted!

[YogaDrone]

Thanks spanieleyes that is helpful. I probably would have been Arthur in your scenarios

[ChicCroissant]

Thanks for the link noblegiraffe, that is a good resource.