Parenting Tips: SATS! – A Daunting Educational Yardstick
Sunday, December 31st, 2006Well, here we are again facing the dreaded standardized achievement tests (SATS). Everyone involved is a bundle of nerves. The head teacher wants to look good on the national league tables. The other teachers want to make a good impression. The poor children, everyone keeps telling them how important the tests are, so they are panicked about not doing well enough.
There are some children who excel at tests and love them. At the other end of the spectrum are those who become completely stressed over exams. Most kids could live just as well without them. If your child stresses to the extreme, how can you help?
SATS (standardised achievement tests) were introduced as a way of assessing schools rather than children. The government wanted to answer two questions: how well are the nation’s children doing, and how well are individual schools doing? To do this, they test children at age 7 to get a baseline score. The children are then tested again at age 11. The difference between the two scores is how much the children have learnt through their four years in school and is referred to as the “value added”. The aim is to raise the overall level of education among eleven year old, and SATS give the government a way of measuring this.
So how is this relevant to your child? It isn’t! The SATS have almost no relevance to an individual child. The secondary school will not use the SATS scores in planning their teaching – they will do their own assessment of each child. Besides, the scores on the SATS, called levels, are so broad that they do not really tell you how well your child is doing. The average eleven year old is supposed to score at level 4. But if your child is at level 4 you still have no idea if your child is the high end or low end of average. If your child scores at a lower or higher level, that too is unlikely to be news to you. Even without the SATS you would almost certainly have known if your child is ahead or behind the rest of the class – and so should the teacher. So your child’s individual SAT scores will not affect his or her education in any way.
By now you are probably wondering what to tell your child if she’s worrying about the SATS. Make it clear to her that it’s the school being tested, not her. Whatever her level, it won’t really matter. Tell her to just do the best that she can, but don’t coerce her in any way to study or practice for it. She’ll have plenty of tests in her life that will make a difference in her life.
If your reassurance doesn’t t help, then talk to her teacher. Find out how he handles explaining the SATS to his students. Let him know that you have concerns about your child, and would like to work out a plan of mutual support.
If you have concerns in general about your child’s school progress, then have a talk with the teacher. You may even need to talk with the head teacher or the Special Needs Coordinator (SENCO). Take action instead of silently worrying.