Dear Parents and Carers,
I hope this letter finds you well. I just wanted to write to you in regards to the Year 2 SATs assessments that normally take place in May.
You may have seen in the news recently that the Government have decided to make the Year 2 SATs optional from this year. This means they are no longer compulsory, and that schools can decide whether to take them or not. It also means that schools do not need to publish their data, and that there will be no national figures released.
Assessment is a key part of schools so that teachers are able to identify nest steps for learning and to be able to measure progress. Assessments at Coleham are teacher assessments, meaning that your child’s teacher will use a bank of evidence to make informed judgements about your child’s attainment in any given subject. The assessments are not test scores alone, but the scores play an important role in the overall teacher assessment process. We then use the assessments generated in Year 2 as a benchmark to measure progress as they move through Year 3-6 (Key Stage 2), because Year 2 is the end of Key Stage 1.
The optional SATs in Year 2 mean that school will receive standardised test papers for the children to complete in maths, reading and grammar (writing assessment is a pure teacher assessment based on writing produced over the course of the year). The Year 2 children will sit these tests in May, as they would do in any other term of the school year, and should not notice anything different. It is important to note that at no point are the children put under any pressure to succeed: instead, they are encouraged to simply do their best as they are in everything they do.
A lot has been said in recent years about the undue stress and anxiety being generated by these tests and others in later years, but at Coleham, our approach minimises, or even prevents, that becoming an issue. However, some children will always be nervous around tests, so we urge you to speak to your child’s teacher if this is the case.
If you have any further questions or queries then please do ask.
Yours sincerely
Mrs Young
KS1 Leader