Yesterday’s Sats results are broadly in line with what we should have all expected. While the proportion of children reaching the expected standard in reading, writing and maths has fallen since 2019, this was always likely to have been the case following more than two years of disrupted education.
What these results really point up though is the tremendous amount of hard work by teachers, support staff, families and, of course, children, over the past couple of years in the shadow of the pandemic. And on a personal note, I am incredibly proud of the tireless work of the staff and pupils across the REAch2 family following the challenges of the last few years.
One particular highlight of the national results was of course reading, which saw a slight increase from 2019. For this to have improved in the face of everything is a real testament to the hard work that has taken place across the country.
Sats results 2022 latest:
It also speaks to the different challenges involved in teaching different subjects remotely. At REAch2, we already knew that reading had been one of the more successful subjects to teach through our online provision, and was one area that parents could more easily support at home. Writing and maths, meanwhile, proved to be far more challenging for families supporting their child’s education.
With the latter, and for older children in particular, we found that some parents and carers just didn’t have the level of skill themselves to support their children. The curriculum also now focuses more on reasoning and problem-solving, rather than merely regurgitating facts and figures, which is far more challenging to teach remotely.
So while today’s results are informative in that they hold up a mirror to what happened during the pandemic and largely confirm what we might have expected, it’s also important not to over-focus on their importance.
They can be a useful means of measuring how far along pupils are in their education, and to see where they may have gaps in their knowledge, but they can only tell us so much about a child’s experience and the impact of the education they are receiving.
And it’s for this reason that, as a sector, we must keep in check any creeping sense of stress on children when taking these exams.
Learning from pupils’ experience
Across the REAch2 family of schools, we surveyed our pupils to find out more about their experience of the Sats. We did this as a short little exercise on the last day of the Sats.
The results showed us that pupils were not as worried about these exams as adults might have thought, with nearly nine in 10 pupils saying they either “enjoyed” or “didn’t mind” taking the tests. We even had two-thirds of the children agree they would choose to keep Sats if they were prime minister for the day.
We have run this survey for the last few years (at least, the years that Sats have actually taken place) and we have received similar results, which really highlight that pupils don’t mind taking these tests so long as they feel properly supported.
While there is a lot we can learn from the Sats, the most important thing is to make sure our children feel supported and happy, rather than piling stress onto them.
Because ultimately, nothing will substantially change because of yesterday’s results. Schools across the country will look at where they have performed well, and where they have gaps in their pupils’ achievements, and will use that to inform their plans for the future. But this is evolution not revolution; adjusting their curricula rather than ripping them up and starting them again.
We are, of course, all still in the process of supporting children in catching up on the learning they may have missed out on. These results show that grades in most of the assessed subjects have fallen slightly, but there is nothing here to set off alarm bells in schools across the country.
On a day that started with the stress of trying to actually get the website to work well enough to show us how our schools had performed, my key takeaway is to continue making sure our pupils don’t get stressed about these tests. They haven’t worried about the Sats, and nor should we.
Cathie Paine is the chief executive of the REAch2 multi-academy trust
