Parents of Year 6 students often ask me this, and it’s a really good question.
To be able to answer it, we must first be clear what significance or impact the results will have for the child.
The results of Key Stage 2 test results are used in various ways.
1) The scores are used by the DfE, the Local Authority, and Ofsted, to make judgements about how well your child’s primary school has been doing its job of educating pupils. They will determine whether enough students have achieved the expected standard, and if not, they will intervene – perhaps with an inspection, or an action plan for the school.
So from a primary school’s point of view, the data from SATs is very important. Teachers and headteachers want students to achieve well; they know how much hard work all the pupils (and all the staff) in the school have put in, during the preceding years, and they want the Year 6 results to reflect this. All schools strive for high achievement of their pupils.
2) The scores are also reported to parents. They tell us about how our child’s school is performing in comparison with others nationally. And of course, they tell us our own child’s result, and whether they are achieving at the expected standard for the national cohort of 11 year olds. For this reason, many parents find the results helpful.
3) When your child moves into Year 7, their KS2 test results are used as an indicator of their potential to achieve grades at GCSE. This is done using a system called Progress 8, which is mandatory in secondary schools, and therefore may have an impact on your child’s experience during the following years. You can find out more about Progress 8, and how Key Stage 2 results feed into it, in this government publication, but I’ll do my best to summarise it here.
The Department for Education uses a student’s Maths and English KS2 results, to assign them a “baseline” GCSE grade, that will be expected of them across 8 different subjects at GCSE level. For example, if a Year 6 pupil scores highly in their KS2 tests, they’ll almost certainly be expected to achieve the highest grades throughout secondary school. This baseline grade follows a pupil through high school, where some schools (though not all) use it as a basis for “setting” or grouping students by ability. Each of their teachers will strive to ensure that each pupil stays on track to achieve at least this grade in their GCSE exams. This is considered by the DfE to be a rigorous and measurable way to hold schools accountable. When GCSE results are in, the cohort’s actual results are compared to their baseline grades, and a score is awarded to the school, which can then be tracked by Ofsted and the Local Authority, for any failings.
This system appears to be a good way of making sure that each child is given the right level of support, challenge and expectation to achieve their potential, and it means that any drops in progress are quickly picked up and addressed.
However, problems may follow if pupils’ KS2 results are inflated above what would be normal for that child (for example due to intensive training for the tests). Primary schools are under increasing amounts of pressure to ensure that their KS2 data is as good as it can possibly be, so in some schools Year 6 is full of practice tests, booster classes, holiday workshops and extra homework. It is quite possible that because of this, some individuals will achieve surprisingly high KS2 results, despite having struggled with areas of the curriculum. The consequence is then a Progress 8 baseline grade that they will struggle to keep up with through secondary school. Although I absolutely advocate for giving children curriculum tutoring as needed, I don’t think there is any reason to coach them to do well in the SATs.
That’s not to say Year 6 children should not be tutored; there are great benefits to providing extra learning at home during their final year of primary school. It means that any gaps in their learning can be identified and filled before they move on to Year 7. It gives the child the opportunity to have targeted, personalised support in areas that might never have had a great deal of focus before, like handwriting, exploring and developing story-writing techniques, problem solving in maths, or higher level calculations like long division. It can give children the boost they need to go off to secondary school as confident and competent students, sometimes even giving them a head-start on the KS3 curriculum too. But this is very different to tutoring them for the SATs, which is more about test performance and maximising scores.
Having a tutor in Year 6 can be very valuable, but it is most beneficial for the student when the tutoring is focussed on equipping them with skills, knowledge and understanding that will help them in the next stage of their learning, rather than on scoring well in the tests. Let their school worry about that part.
