Yr2 SATs

[CocoM66]

The year 2 sats are now optional. Does anyone know, anecdotally or otherwise, what proportion of schools are going to be doing them this year?
Our school is opting out, which I am a little disappointed about as I thought they could have provided an idea as to how my child is actually getting on. Parents evenings and reports just give the usual "they are doing great".

I wouldnt worry, the results you get are very very vague. Just a 'working to greater depth' type thing. I had assumed you get a numerical grade and could look at where they sat on a normal distribution but we weren't allowed to see that.

Dyna - you would have needed to ask for the scaled score.

Op you can do a test at home. And mark it.

I've suggested to my previous Head (I've left now, he's a poor Head) that the school do them. We'd be doing some form of summative assessment anyway, and the Y2 SATs papers will be free this year (so budget-friendly) . It'll just be lower stakes.

I don’t need to put six and seven year olds through the stress of examination conditions to assess their learning. Unbelievable that anyone would want to do that to a child.

My son is now in year 4 and did do the year 2 SATs. We heard nothing about it, he barely knew they had any importance, didn’t hear anything about it at parents eve etc. Didn’t know when they were, he didn’t mention anything about having done them etc. Basically it was all very very low key. So no point doing them or not either way, from a parent’s POV.

They’ll be available online by the end of the academic year I expect so you can do them at home.

Thank you for the replies.
I didn't know the past papers and scaled scores were available online. I will have a look through them.

We did and were told we couldn't have it

There was guidance that they should provide if requested. Though i guess most kids it likely matched their end of year2 report.
My dc2 though results were completely 'off' inaccurate. No idea what happened except that its in a schools interest for kids not to do well at ks1. Also Maths fell into exceeding but report was 'met'. As progress looks worse if kisds go from exceeding to met.

@TheWalkingDeadly it's entirely possible to achieve greater depth on a SAT paper (particularly maths) but not have demonstrated evidence of all of the other TAF statements. Happens fairly frequently.

Maybe but it should be fairly easy to move up to greater depth between may and july though.

Seriously they mean F all except for schools. They teach to the test and they really aren't an indicator of how kids are doing just how they are doing for the things that are tested.

That is true of any test.
But agree that schools focus on parts of sats maths/reading etc and possibly less on writing. Likewise how much has science dropped since ks2 sats removed the test?

Anyway certainly the ks2 ones are a good idea as preparartion for the multitude of tests at end of each topic each subject at secondary.

I was wondering about this when looking through the past papers. There's only say 20 spelling or 25 arithmetic questions. It looks like they're more useful on a class/school level than an individual pupil level. Which is perhaps what they were intended for.

There was no greater depth score on the ks1 papers (KS1 leader). You either met the expected standard (scaled score of 100+) or you didn't.

You could only get greater depth on teacher assessment - and ultimately this was all that mattered because this was the data you were required to send to the local authority.

The KS1 tests just added unnecessary workload for Year 2 teachers when they 'removed' testing for 7 year olds in favour of teacher assessment. They barely even provided any evidence for the teacher assessment statements.