Helping your child with SATs

Most families want to help and are not sure how much is too much. The short answer: little and often, focused on gaps, and calm about the outcome.

What genuinely helps

• Short regular sessions. Fifteen minutes most days beats two hours at the weekend, for retention and for morale.
• Working on gaps, not everything. Practice on topics already secure feels productive and achieves little.
• Reading together, still. Ten and eleven year olds who are read with, or who read alongside an adult reading their own book, keep reading stamina up.
• Sleep and breakfast in May. Unglamorous, and worth more than an extra revision session.

What tends to backfire

• Doing paper after paper. Testing measures; it does not teach. If the score is not being used to change what you practise next, it is not doing anything.
• Revising everything equally. Time is finite; spend it where marks are being lost.
• Transmitting your own anxiety. Children read tone far better than words. 'This is important' lands very differently from 'let's see what you find tricky'.
• Comparing with other children. Never once helped anybody.

Finding the gaps

You cannot fix what you have not identified. Keep a simple note of topics where marks get dropped — fractions, fronted adverbials, inference questions — over two or three weeks.

The list will be shorter than you fear. Most children have four or five genuine weak spots, not twenty.

Keeping perspective

SATs do not determine secondary school places. They do not follow a child through life. Most adults could not tell you their own result.

What matters is that your child arrives in Year 7 confident about number and comfortable reading. That is worth working towards. The score in May is a by-product.