Year 6 SAT revision books

[MrsDexter]

Hi can anyone recommend any revision books. I was always told the marks meant nothing to the child but our first choice secondary looks at SATSs for their grammar stream. Thanks

Cgp books are good.
As is going back over past papers for maths though they will likely do some at school.

CPG SATs specific study books for Maths and English

Thank you. Should I get the study books or the 10 minute tests?

Thanks. I read you shouldn't go over past papers as school would do it? I'm not sure whether to buy study books or the 10 minute ones?

We were recommended to get the Rising Stars ones by our school and they were terrible - particularly the Reading and SPAG ones. The maths ones were OK.

The most helpful thing we did was googling past papers and practising those.

Yep, CGP books are the best ones - we give our Y6 children a pack of these after Christmas.
Might be worth just checking with the teacher to make sure they don't do the same?

CGP. Rising Stars are shite, you're right!

TBH I would just download some old papers off the govt website too and get practising those.

Tempting as it is to download the old papers (and they are all online), try not to!!

If your DC's school is like mine, they'll be practising using the old test papers until May anyway. Also, some years were much easier (2022) and some much harder (2023!!) so would give a false picture.

CGP do also produce pretty good replica practice papers very similar to the real thing.

CGP and Scholastic for study books/workbooks, Exam Ninja and CGP for practice papers. Schools will often do past ones in the run-up so you may/may not want to use those yourself.

Our school uses past papers for practise so they asked not to use them ourselves at home. We used Atom Learning for Year 6 SATS practise although I appreciate this costs a lot.

You might find that if the secondary school has a grammar stream, some of the children will have sat the 11+ so ideally you would like to have a go at some of the many free papers online to help get your child into the grammar stream. This website has free papers with answers:

Free 11 Plus (11+) Practice Papers - Owl Tutors

By the way, if you do want to use past SATs papers then this website is great:

https://www.sats-papers.co.uk/

In my experience, schools like to use some of their own materials (that they've bought in e.g. WRM and some others) as well as recent past papers. Hence if you wanted to try the samples from 2016 or some of the earlier iterations (e.g. 2016-18) then you'll likely not tread on anyone's feet!

Is there any benefit to revising for sats papers? The school really ramps up the amount of work on them in the school day and with additional homework as they approach.

I think there's an advantage to making sure you know the KS2 curriculum very thoroughly before secondary, yes. Children who pass their SATS with under around 103 arguably don't know it thoroughly as the pass mark is pretty low.

My older children did know the curriculum very thoroughly, just by doing what was asked by the school, and they were bored out of their minds while their top set maths classes in secondary repeated much of the y6 work anyway.

Some parents get really wound-up by it all but I think it's important that kids get to experience something that "matters" - the preparation, the struggle, dealing with a little anxiety and then the aftermath. What's especially good is if they're all going through it together as a class/year group.

It's genuinely eye-opening to see kids at 16 struggling with GCSE exam stress when they've been sheltered from anything like that before.

But there are plenty of exams to negotiate before GCSEs. End of year exams, year 10 mocks, y11 mocks. Who gets to gcse's grateful for the experience of doing y6 sats?

Noooooo!!

By the way, if you do want to use past SATs papers then this website is great:

www.sats-papers.co.uk/

In my experience, schools like to use some of their own materials (that they've bought in e.g. WRM and some others) as well as recent past papers. Hence if you wanted to try the samples from 2016 or some of the earlier iterations (e.g. 2016-18) then you'll likely not tread on anyone's feet!

Please don't use these if you can help it. Schools don't just use the papers for mock SATS practice; we use the questions in lessons. Often, they are from much older papers.

Honestly, you don't really need to do anything additionally for SATS.

Namely as they are mostly pointless 😉

I tried to quote from an earlier post but it now looks like I'm arguing with myself..
Sorry!

Oh I wouldn't say SATs are pointless at all. They serve a purpose and anyone that's looking at which school to send their children to should look at their SATs results - it's all part of the package.

Do they ultimately matter to your child? No, probably not. That said, I'd much rather my children leave primary school on a high than not.

They're not pointless given that the vast majority of high schools use the SATS results in conjunction with CAT results to predict final MEGS.

A child who scores poorly in sats is unlikely to somehow magically pick it all up in Year 7/8 (where arguable the teaching is fairly shite - here's a worksheet, stick it in) - it's the foundation of doing well at GCSE. I do agree the bright ones will probably be bored though.