YR6 sat how important is it to state secondary?

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Sorry today's hot and boring question! Just wonder if any secondary school teachers or experienced parents would share their views on how sat results had affected yr7 dc's. Or how do state secondary school see or use the yr6 sat results initially? My main concern is if my dd didn't do well enough on that one test will it really affect the rest of her school career.

Some schools use them to set the children whereas other schools use their own assessments.

My dd is in Yr 7....I think her year end targets were based on both SATS and previous school reported levels ....Does it affect her ....no....she's set for Maths/ICT/Science but the class was a mixture of level 5/6's ...She didn't sit Level 6 papers but is already accessed as Level 7 ...I would have quite willingly pulled her out of school for SATS week (or even Yr)....preparing children to pass a test by giving them pass paper after past paper achieves very little !

SATS might inform initial setting or streaming, but most shools will then do their own assessments at the end of the first term, or even later. They might use CAT tests, and / or course and class work.

I would be very surprised if a SATS result affected the rest of a child's school career. I think primary school teachers send a report, too - DS's primary school were asked to comment on whether they thought the stream they had assigned a child to was appropriate, so they weren't just using banding tests and SATS.

at ds1's (now yr 8) school, they used SATs result to stream them initially in yr 7, though that was reviewed by i think 2nd term. and to set targets.

but in the very first parents eve, and every subsequent one, all the teachers i've asked about both his SATs results and targets have said that the NC levels are a load of nonsense that only give a snapshot of one piece of work at one time and that they mean nothing at all.

To be perfectly honest, some of the primary schools in our cachement area 'massage' their figures (i.e. 2 students, identical ability/skills, from 2 schools. I can tell immediately one will be 2 sub levels higher than the other based on primary school names alone) ...so we use NFER and a reading test, alongside our own writing test, for our new Y7.

I have never met a HoY or senior teacher who isn't aware this happens (SO unfair to primary schools who standardise and monitor their KS2 SATS well) - and most will have a test they use for setting.

We do have to use KS2 data to set 'targets' for GCSE. However these are just that, targets. By Y10, if a student is on a target of a D but is clearly top set, it will make no difference to their set - likewise if they are targeted an A and actually genuinely weaker (happened when a primary switched papers of same-named kids one year, borough never fixed it!) we won't make them feel bad.

Now with levels of progress being a big focus, SATs levels are suddenly being majorly scrutinised. Excel spreadsheets are set up with each kid and their KS2 SATs level and where they are headed at GCSE and formulas set up to highlight them in red if progress is not good enough.

Then questions are asked of the teachers as to why these kids aren't performing, and this stress filters down.

So hot housing kids in primary to perform beyond their natural ability isn't the best idea at the moment.

Noble we've been told NFER style tests upon arrival are on the way, to level the playing field. Which will make SATS defunct. I would hope... they are ridiculous. Even when externally marked I remember buying back some papers the primary was iffy about and finding they had not a pen mark on them. We reported it, but who knows if anything happened.

OP don't worry it had no bearing on the secondary career. One of my DD's went to a private school where they didn't even do SATS.

In my younger DD's school they were set initially on the results of the banding admissions test and then some moved during the year. I asked about SATS as that was a rumour locally but was told they got the results too late for setting. They did a test (Isis???) in the first few weeks. I think that was for tracking purposes though, in fact DD was off sick and missed it. I think the setting or streaming was partly social engineering.

DD is in year 7 and her high school used a combination of their own tests and her SATS results to decide her targets and appropriate set. I received progress updates every term to see if she is on track to reach the required target level. For those subjects she had never done before the levels were very low compared to those for the traditional subjects.