Are children with special needs included in SATs results?

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I've been trying to work out whether our local school is any good. It takes a lot of children with special needs including those with physical and learning disabilities. I wasn't sure whether these children would be included in the SATs results as they could easily skew the results which is quite an issue in relation to school league tables etc. According to the Dfes website the school's point average is 28.2. Do these figures include every child registered in the year or would some of them be excluded from the figures?

Only a very small number of children are excluded for SAT's. The school has to apply for the child to be exempt and I must say the child has to have severe special needs to be excluded. 28.2 is quite good!

Yes, they are included, and yes it does have a drastic effect on some schools results.

Every child in year 6 is counted, including at our school one year a child who had arrived from Denmark six days before the test and who spoke no English....

Children can be 'disapplied' from the tests if they cannot access the curriculum or are unable to do the tests, but although they are recorded as disapplied, the 'headline figure' still includes them - and that's the one that's published.

My sons go to a school where there is a high % of SEN children and the SATs results are at best average.

However, this is much better than the level they are when they enter the school with very high % being below average. Can you get hold of this info?

I have been very pleased with the school and can see why they make such good progress, although from the intake, it is clear the SATs results will never make it the sort of school parents fight over. However, I must say that can also be an advantage. As the school is underscribed, my boys are in classes of 23 & 26.

I have friends who have pulled all sorts of tricks to get into "good" schools and they seem almost universally disapointed. It seems the only difference between schools that are "good" and "bad" on paper, is the effort the parents put in at home. Some schools, full of pushy parents, don't seem to have to put much effort in at all to achieve good results, but of course those children would succeed wherever they went.

My parents are both teachers and my Dad has stong views about school admissions. He thinks it is very sad that parents don't have enough confidence in their own children to believe they will do well wherever they go

It depends on the type and degree of the SEN.

The vast majority of our children on the SEN regester did the SATs and are in the results. Off had I can only think of one or two who were disapplied, one had Down's Syndrome and one had profound learning problems

my ds current school is a mainstream school but 60% of its roll are registered with some form of SEN.

they are all included in the SATS result but if you look at the offsted reports you will see that the number of SEN registered children should be listed as well as teh sats results.

In our tiny state village school, the % of SEN kids makes a huge difference. DS1 took his SATS this May and the results were shockingly dreadful on paper, however there were only 10 children, 2 are statemented with severe difficulties, & 2 SEN which leaves only 6 kids. I know however that the (SEN) kids in his class have come on leaps and bounds and the schools Value Added score is high.

Thank you all for getting back to me. That's very helpful.

Kids in special schools do SATS if there is a chance that they will be graded. If they are disapplied then the teacher has to do an assessment. Really severe SEN kids will be on the P scales.

Not all SEN children do SATS, some are just teacher assessed if they are working below the level assessed by the tests (Level 3). But they are all included in the reported results.
We had a Somalian refugee family whose child had already been on roll in 2 schools eslewhere in the UK. Their child was in Y6and had very poor English, but some local schools discouraged his enrolment, seeing him as an immediate 4% dip in their league table results. Our head took him in immediately, insisting that his needs were more important than figures, and we were able to give him and his family lots of support. Not all heads would do this, and although I have lots of misgivings about ours I fully respect and admire him for the stance he takes in cases like this.
And that's where league tables are bollocks! They don't measure the type of help we were able to provide for this child, except as a negative figure.

Yes, and SATs results are severely skewed by SEN. There's a trend locally for girls in particular to attend the state schools till Junior age (doing the age-7 SATs on the way) and then leave for private school at age 8 or 9. The school then has lots of lovely vacancies for kids (ususally boys) excluded elsewhere. Weirdly, the school is still meant to match the 'predicted' SATs scores made for a very different cohort of children after the first set of SATs. F'rinstance, my own son's year lost six out of 16 children mostly the higher-income, well supported ones between yr 3 and yr 6, and took in six others, five of whom were on the SEN register.

They still beat the predicted SATs scores!