SATS - school terrible, advice please

[pickupthismess]

DS is in reception and his brother is following him next year.

We chose the school and indeed moved to the village on the whole basis that the primary was one of the best in the county.

Over the last two years the SATS results have been terrible and this year the school is one of the lowest.

I've heard rumblings that some parents have left and some new kids aren't coming but it's a bit like a police state in our playground. Noone will ever say a bad word about the school and you are looked on askance for questioning it.

I know nothing about SATS other than they are controversial but surely this kind of sudden downward trend is indicative of something???

I want to speak to someone but don't know if it should be the Head, who is acknowledged by all as lazy and can't be arsed or the governors. Help.

Should I send the boys somewhere else?

I wouldn't choose a school on SATs results
I think there is more to a school than testing children
it could be that the head won't be at the school for very much longer anyway
and things can change

Agree that SATS are not the be all and end all. Is your DS happy there? This is more important than what the SATS results are. Are they the Year 2 ones or the later ones? Has the school been OFSTEDed recently? If not then they will be due and you can make your concerns known.

I've no idea what the SATS results are for DS's school - I just know he is happy there and is being given excellent support. My feeling is that SATS are immaterial as if children are happy and supported then they will learn. Do you have other concerns beyond the SATS? It sounds like you do.

SAT's results can be misleading. It depends on so many things. The children's levels when they enter the school (baseline) for the last few years may have been low and then the results may follow this. The key is how much 'value' has been added e.g. how much progress has been achieved. Some schools that get brilliant results have a very high level intake but parents wouldn't really know that. I think you need to look at how your own child is doing and decide if you are happy with that. I would also make an appointment to see the Head to get a first hand opinion and some possible answers.

How is your child doing? Is he happy and are you happy with how he is gettng on?

Has the school been OFSTEDed recently?

Are all the SATS dropping, or is it just Year 3 or Year 6?

If I were you, I would voice your concerns with the Head - a couple of bad years in one year's SATS can sometimes be explained by a couple of lower ability years (it happens - no one knows why!) But if Yerar 3 AND year 6 are both down, then that might be more cause for concern.

However, there is a lot more to a school than SATS. How does the place feel? What's the atmosphere like? Is there lots going on?

I agree SATs results aren't everything (and the intake of the school can make a big difference. a school with lots of kids with SEN will do worse than a school full of high achieving on entry middle class kids). BUT in this instance I would be concerned if you feel the head is lazy/disinterested, and the school has slipped massively recently and for 2 consecutive years - as it's not as if the school intake demographics will have changed vastly. DS's school SATs results aren't all that good, but they never have been, and I send him there for the small classes and kind attitude towards the pupils (he has mild SEN).

If the reception class teacher is approachable I would be inclined to start by asking her.

How terrible are the recent SAT results? Tell us the numbers.

Well they're int he 50s and most surrounding schools are in the 90s.

All the posters are right when they say there must be other issues. I guess my issue is that I think the head will brush it off as she has anyone that raises concerns.

I've heard on the grapevine that students are behind other shcools but don't know this first hand. My Ds is Ok there but I wouldn't say he is wonderfully happy. I've posted before because it has very small classes and very few boys. His BF was one of convenience and he is quite lonely now. This kind of compounds it.

Sorry - don't understand the 50s and 90s? Is that the % of year 2s getting level 2bs? Or year 6s getting 4bs? Could you say a bit more?

Do you mean on this sort of table, ~50% for English and maths at KS2?

If so, those are quite awful results, and don't seem to make sense unless it's quite a deprived area (like the school I linked to above). Although a lot can depend on how small the school is; maybe just a few children dragged the results down, especially if it happened to be a few year groups where there weren't any or many high achievers. Still, if I've understood OP right, she's right to worry.

Have you played parent helper, gone in to help out? That could help you see what the teaching is like, how behaviour issues are managed, if brightest children are being stretched, etc.

Do you know what the school's value added score is? This will give you a better idea of whether the children make the progress that they should make. I would agree with the other messages that SATs are not everything and for that matter neither is OFSTED - they only see a snippet of what a school is like. I would be more concerned about whether my child felt happy, secure and was making reasonable progress.

Low SATs results at Y6 coupled with very good value added scores mean that the school could in fact be good rather than poor.

The point is you shouldn't look at the SATs scores in isolation. Having said that,a school which was until recently considered one of the best with scores around 90% but suddenly now scores 50% clearly says something is wrong.

Make an appointment and speak to the Head. Don't be confrontational, just come across as wanting reassurance.

It could be something strange like a disproportionate number of absences in SATs week or a small change in catchment so the school now takes children from a far more disadvantaged area. The school may be just as good but may not have hadan opportunity to help those kids reach their potential.

You won't know what's behind it unless you ask. I think it is very unlikely to be down to a 'lazy' Headteacher. Maybe (s)he isn't pulling their weight but it's far more likely to be down to illness or family problems rather than laziness.

The only way is to look at the school. I wouldn't worry about SATs results. I go into one that was 4th in our LEA last year-the staff know that they won't be anywhere near that position this year-same staff, same lessons-different DCs.

Small year group? Often this means very variable test results from year to year! How much do you know about DC's yeargroups? Small village schools are hugely disadvantaged by the SATS system as they can rarely get a true result.. 2 level 1's for example could bring the overall result down by 30%.
Hope this helps

In a small village school, SATS reults can be very misleading. Try to average out the reults over 3 years and look at the trends. However, if over 3 years, the numbers of children are still below 30, then really, all statistics are very unreliable. Just 1 child with a statement of special needs or with a learning difficulty without a statetment can send a small year group's results spiralling down. SATS are 1 way of measuring a school's performance, not the only way - and there is a lot of debate about their validity at the moment. Also remember, Ofsted is a snapshot judgement, given on 1 or 2 days whilst the inspection team are there.
I would be asking questions like:-

• How welcome am I when I go into school?
• Are staff willing to talk to me and take my concerns seriously?
• Is gossip like, "the head is lazy," grounded in any fact or, because the head might not have a class, is there a lack of understanding about what the head is doing to strategically improve the school?
• How often do I get to see my child's work?
• Does my child have challenging targets set and reviewed regularly?
• How is my child's reading developing?
• Is my child's interest in numbers and the world around them being fostered through school?

As a Mum, nobody knows your child like you do. The school with the best results and Ofsted report in the country might not be the best school for your child. Go with your gut instinct - I don't think that there's an assessment or league table to quantify Mum's gut instinct...yet!

Thanks to everyone who replied. I see that teachers are planning a boycott of SATS in primary schools so I am a bit more relaxed now about these bad results.

What I am concerned about still is the general laissez faire attitude of the Head. There doesn't seem to a lot of new ideas or intersting things going on. I have also heard that some teachers in later years are dreadful but that noone can get rid of them.

We only have one young teacher, nearly all the others are women on the verge of retirement who probably do the job because it is handy. Some don't even seem to like children that much from my experience. I can't fault the Reception teachers though. However, it is the village school and everyone that DS knows goes there.

I'd be more concerned about a lack of interesting things happening than poor SAT results.

What does the value added figure mean? In the recent table published in my local paper, DD's school had ok ish SATS, but the value added (if I am thinking of the right thing) was one of the lowest at 98%, the other schools were over 100%.

It is supposed to indicate the improvement children have made since starting school. A school can have lower SAT results but good value added depending on the progress children have made in their time at school.

Do you know how Value Added is worked out? Our school had low VA aswell.

The blurb from Dept of Carpets and Soft Furnishings says

To give each school a value added rating, or measure, data is gathered from the school based on its pupils' KS1 and 2 results, and then compared against national averages.

A value added measure for every school is ultimately to be included as additional information in the traditional primary school performance tables. This measure, which takes into account individual pupils' starting points at each school, will provide a better insight into a school's actual performance by highlighting the progress it has helped its pupils make rather than focusing on the school's KS2 results themselves. In addition, value added measures are intended to allow comparisons between schools with different pupil intakes.

So is 98% good even though it was one of the lowest or should it be over 100?

There's a lot of research that says VA is unreliable and I think it is going to be scrapped

Iirc, the CVA score isn't a percentage as such - 100 is the mean and anything over that is value added and anything under means that value has been subtracted (ie: pupils have done less well at KS2 than they were predicted to do at KS1) so 98 is a negative score... But, yes, there are a lot of question marks over it.

I agree with Louie1, if you already have a child at the school then think about your/his experience of it rather than the league tables. If the school is bumping along the bottom of the league tables though, I would say the HT's position is pretty untenable and the LA may be looking to replace him or at least helicopter in some new management to ease him out support him.

It sounds very like my dd's school (except her has always been a bit rubbish, never near the top of the league tables) but it didn't take much pressure to topple the HT and I suspect a lot of her cronies will be going with her at the end of the academic year.

Going back to my OP - if I have concerns should I speak to the LA, the governors or the Head (although the latter will give it short thrift)?

Head first then Governors then LA