iASPIRE with EASY SATS. Standard Assessment Tests

SATS 

Pupils are tested in English and Maths. English KS2 SATs tests are made up of a reading comprehension task (Reading Test), a spelling task and two writing tasks. 

National Curriculum assessments are a series of educational assessments, colloquially known as Sats or SATs.

SATs help teachers and you to learn more about your child's strengths and weaknesses. Teachers can compare how well each child is doing with their peers, both in their school and across the country. They can also measure how much each child improves from one Key Stage to another and are used to predict the likelihood of children achieving specific results in their GCSEs. In addition, headteachers, local authorities and the Department for Education use the results to help identify schools that are struggling and, if a school is doing really well, it can share what it's doing right with other schools. 

In England, the tests are compulsory for all seven and 11 year olds. SATs in Key Stage 3 have been scrapped, but 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. 

Here are some common phrases your child's teacher might use decoded: 

• SATs: Short for Standard Assessment Tests or 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.