The last of the papers are - finally - tucked away inside their Parcelforce envelopes and on their way to the markers.

The long-awaited, hotly-debated and over-anticipated Sats has been and gone. On the whole, the children coped well and worked extraordinarily hard to show themselves in their best light.

For some, Sats week was pretty easy to navigate, for others it was something of a trauma. The little girl that sat on her teacher’s knee at the end of the first reasoning paper and sobbed about how stupid she felt, and the other who wrote ‘I am dumb” again and again in the answer boxes of the most difficult questions, definitely fit into the latter group.

At my school, we ensure that Sat preparation is kept to the last six weeks before the tests, so that curriculum disruption is minimised. But during that time the children have become very familiar with the layout, format, and content of the tests, with a restricted curricular diet as a consequence. In the two weeks running up to the Sats, they were cosseted and wrapped in cotton wool to ensure they were like finely tuned athletes ready to go.

‘The weight of Sats is off my shoulders’

After the last paper was closed and sent on its merry way, I asked the children what were the best things about Sats being over and this is what they said:

• “We can relax and speak to each other again”
• “The weight of Sats is off my shoulders”
• “No more Spag every day”
• “We can learn other things than Sats.”
• “We will learn new things instead of revising what we’ve already done”
• “I don’t need to ever look at a Sat paper again”
• “We can go back to having more fun”
• “We can work together again instead of on our own”
• “We can feel like everybody else in school again”

Then I asked them what they were looking forward to for the rest of the school year. This question caused much excitement: many said it was the royal wedding street party happening on our playground today, and the ‘World of Work’ theme next half-term, which will see them apply for jobs, attend job interviews and work in a ‘workplace’ around school with children from each year group.

Others are looking forward to learning how to bikes more safely and help us to take the whole school on a cycle ride along the beautiful Morecambe Bay Promenade. Some said they will throw themselves back into art projects, others are excited to go on their Year 6 trip and prepare their leavers assembly. There’s also the training for, participating in and helping teachers run sports’ day, catching up on their history topic that that was squeezed out of the way to make room for Sats practice, and classifying minibeasts and making models together.

All of these wonderful activities bind them even closer to our school family and get them ready to successfully move away from us to high school.

What am I looking forward to? Opening the secure cupboard in my office again without the fear that somebody’s cracked the padlock and sneaked a peek into the sealed test packets/ boxes. 

As a team, we’re all looking forward to sending support staff back to their usual roles, rather than rubbing children’s backs supportively and smiling as comfortingly as possible while explaining that they can’t help and that there are only five minutes left.

We are looking forward to not having to collate papers against registers, whilst ensuring that surname changes match what is on the register and that we’ve used the right code for children not present.

We are looking forward to not having to chase up the children that are half an hour late and not trying to double guess what might be on the next day’s paper.

We are looking forward to going home without a stress headache eating at the side of the temple and the overriding urge to open a bottle of wine as soon as we reach home.

And we are looking forward to getting back to normal, and to breathing a sigh of relief and saying, “Thank God the Sats are over.” (At least until next year.) 

Siobhan Collingwood is the headteacher of Morecambe Bay Community Primary School, winner of the Creative School of the Year category at the 2017 Tes Schools Awards