{"id":96872,"date":"2016-05-09T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-05-08T23:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.72point.com\/sats-testing-skills-for-school-not-for-life\/"},"modified":"2025-11-07T11:13:41","modified_gmt":"2025-11-07T11:13:41","slug":"sats-testing-skills-for-school-not-for-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.72point.com\/us\/sats-testing-skills-for-school-not-for-life\/","title":{"rendered":"SATS: Testing skills for school not for life"},"content":{"rendered":"

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]\"YearToday marks the start of SATS week for my son, his friends and thousands of other 11-year-olds across the UK.\u00a0 It\u2019s an enormously pressured occasion for all of the children, but for my son, in particular, the tests will be particularly arduous as he is dyslexic.<\/p>\n

Perhaps if my son wasn’t 2.5 years behind his peers already I might not worry so much about how he will make it through the week, but there are a number of other reasons why I disagree with the way schools and the government handle the Year 6 SATS.<\/p>\n

What really bothers me is the fact my son has spent every night since September desperately trying to answer mock papers, crying when he gets the answers wrong because he can\u2019t remember what phrases such as subordinating conjunction, synonym and adverbial mean. He\u2019s not alone; my Facebook page went wild with parents complaining their children also couldn’t do the papers, and worse still they didn’t know how to help because the questions were utterly baffling.<\/p>\n

Perhaps worse than that \u2013 because when he\u2019s at home I can at least manage the tears and disappointment \u2013 is the fact his entire Year 6 curriculum has been based around the looming SATS.\u00a0 Day in and day out the school has been \u2018preparing\u2019 the children for these tests which, in the long run, do nothing to benefit the child and everything to benefit the school.<\/p>\n

This means lessons aren’t fun, and rather than learning how to write creative pieces of text, they\u2019re learning ridiculous phrases such as present progressive, relative pronoun and preposition.<\/p>\n

And what I really, really, take insult to is that on my son\u2019s first parent\u2019s evening of the year we were effectively told (after a deep sigh from his teacher) that because he had no hope of passing the SATS due to his dyslexia, he was pretty much a failure.\u00a0 So, no SATS results means you\u2019re no good.\u00a0 Never mind the fact my son is a technical whizz kid, has the inventing skills of Thomas Edison and the artistic skills of Pablo Picasso (alright that might be the proud parent talking, but you get my gist). No, because my son probably won\u2019t pass his SATS this year, according to his teacher, and probably the government, he\u2019s no good.<\/p>\n

What really bugs me is that writing, learning and going to school should be FUN.\u00a0 And this year has not been fun.\u00a0 For any child, surely the most important thing is that by the time they leave school they are able to write a grammatically correct piece of text, understand when and where to use punctuation, and be able to decipher the meaning of a piece of writing?\u00a0 Is that not all the average adult does day to day?<\/p>\n

Which got me thinking.\u00a0 I write for a living, and have done so for 17 years, so how would I do when faced with the Year 6 grammar test?\u00a0 I’ve been helping my son revise for the past six months, I don\u2019t have dyslexia, and I’m pretty darn good at my job, so I should pass with flying colours \u2013 right?<\/p>\n

Wrong!<\/p>\n

I sourced a SATS test online and answered 10 minutes of questions similar to the following:[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_empty_space height=”22px”][vc_column_text]<\/p>\n

Q: Which sentence uses the past progressive?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. After Ali finished his homework, he went out to play<\/em><\/li>\n
  2. Gemma was doing her science homework<\/em><\/li>\n
  3. Jamie learnt his spellings every night<\/em><\/li>\n
  4. Anna found her history homework difficult<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Q: In this sentence, is the word after<\/u> being used as a subordinate conjunction or as a preposition?<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n