SATS VS GCSE results.

[Laladipsypo]

Hi 👋
congratulations to all those who children received their results today !

im just wondering as I have been watching Munster about the sats and gcse scores esofaifsllt some of the more stressful posts surrounding how sats predict their GCSE results.

anyone have any children who were not high achievers in their year 6 sats but actually went on to do well at GCSE.

any tips for a mum about to enter this journey :) x

This cohort didn't sit SATs - they lost Y6 to covid, and entered Y7 in bubbles and isolation for contact with covid.

That said, whatever system they used to predict DSs grades were way off. English (his weakest subject) was accurate, but he got a grade or 2 higher in every other subject.

My son did really poorly in his yr 6/7 maths sats and average in English. He got an A* for English language yesterday and a B for maths (we are in wales). Wales do these 2 GCSEs in year 10. We have had a maths tutor for the last year and a half though and she made a big difference.

We did SATs at the same time as the Kent Test, which many kids were more worried about. At the time the viewpoint was the KT was way more important because the SATs were just about the primary school ticking boxes. Considering the stress on the 10yo at the time I often wonder if the SATs in Kent and other grammar areas show any differences - can't be very accurate if you have some being tutored etc. I don't even know what dd got to be honest as we were more interested in the CATs test which seemed to be more about innate ability and therefore more reliable. So far this is being bourne out with kids who did well in CATs doing better even if they didn't pass KT.

My ds has achieved very high gcse results. He was under the radar at primary, very shy and kind of fell through the cracks. Average performance academically.
At his secondary (probably the least popular in the area) he has been allowed to shine. They worked out where he needed support and that helped his confidence. Secondary has worked out better than his primary all round.

School Data Manager here. Yes, there is a rough correspondence between SATS and GCSE, but it's a bit of a blunt tool and it's a better predictor for attainment bands (High, Middle, Low) rather than the grades themselves.

Theoretically, a child's GCSEs should average out to the grades predicted from SATS.

The difference between SATS and GCSE is used to make the Progress 8 score for each school. Again, this is a blunt tool that shows the progress for the whole cohort and for subsets of a cohort.