Assessment
Get ready for SATs in May with our guide to everything you need to know about these statutory assessments.
1. What are SATs for?
2. Does my child have to take SATs?
3. What do the tests involve?
Children are tested on what they have been learning at school. At Key Stage 1 (Year 2), your child will take official SATs in reading, grammar, punctuation and spelling, and maths. They will also be assessed by their teacher (known as the teacher assessment) on speaking and listening, writing and science. At Key Stage 2 (Year 6), teacher assessment will cover English reading, grammar, punctuation and spelling, and maths. Other subjects including writing, speaking and listening and science are teacher assessed.
Teacher assessment can help to judge children's performance in a subject over a longer period of time. The results of teacher assessment are equally important, as a teacher may feel your child is doing better in a subject as a whole than in the parts of it covered by a test.
4. How will my child be helped to prepare?
5. So why do SATs seem so stressful?
6. What level should my child achieve in their SATs?
7. When will I know the results?
8. What does all the SATs jargon mean?
- SATs: Short for Standard Assessment Tests
- National curriculum tests: The real name for SATs, but many people still refer to them as SATs
- Raw score: the number of marks your child gets on the tests
- Scaled score: a converted score that allows results to be compared from one year to the next
- National standard: the level that 85 per cent of children are expected to reach
- Age-standardised test scores: refers to the system used to inform parents how their child did compared with other children born in the same month.