When should we start SATs revision?

For most children, short regular practice from the start of the spring term of Year 6 is plenty. Starting in Year 5, or over the summer holiday before Year 6, buys very little and costs a lot of goodwill.

The short answer

January of Year 6 is early enough for the overwhelming majority of children. That leaves roughly sixteen school weeks before the tests in May — far more time than the amount of material actually requires.

The exception is arithmetic fluency. If your child is still counting on fingers for times tables, that is worth working on whenever you notice it, in Year 4, 5 or 6, because it is slow to build and everything else in maths sits on top of it.

What almost never helps is starting in September of Year 6 with a revision timetable. Eight months is longer than a ten-year-old can sustain any kind of enthusiasm for, and the usual result is a child who is thoroughly sick of the word SATs by February.

Why starting earlier backfires

Revision works by retrieving things you have already been taught. In September of Year 6 a good deal of the content has not been taught yet — long division, some of the grammar terminology, several of the reasoning question types. Revising it early means teaching it at home first, badly, and often in a way that conflicts with how school will teach it later.

There is also a simple motivational problem. Attention is finite. A child who has been doing SATs practice since Year 5 has nothing left to give in April, which is precisely when a bit of extra effort would actually pay.

The families who find May hardest are rarely the ones who started late. They are usually the ones who started too early and burned out.

A term-by-term shape for Year 6

• Autumn term — nothing formal. Keep reading for pleasure, and keep times tables sharp. If you do one thing, make it ten minutes of arithmetic a couple of times a week.
• Spring term — start proper practice. Two or three short sessions a week, fifteen to twenty minutes each. Focus on finding weak topics rather than covering everything.
• Easter holidays — the single most useful fortnight. One full past paper under timed conditions, then targeted practice on whatever it exposed. Not every day; four or five sessions across the two weeks.
• Summer term to May — one or two timed papers a week, and stop entirely in the last few days. Cramming in SATs week has never improved anyone's score and reliably worsens their sleep.

How much is enough?

Fifteen to twenty minutes, two or three times a week, from January. That is around twelve hours of practice across the whole spring term, and for most children it is genuinely sufficient.

The number that matters is not hours logged but topics fixed. A child who spends four sessions on the two things they consistently get wrong will gain more marks than one who spends twenty sessions rehearsing what they can already do — which is what unstructured revision usually turns into, because doing what you are good at feels nicer.

This is the one place where practising online genuinely beats a workbook: it can tell you where the marks are actually going. A workbook cannot.

Signs you are doing too much

Your child is anxious about a test that does not decide anything about their future. Tears before a practice session. Sunday evenings dominated by it.

You are arguing about SATs more than once a week. The revision is now costing more in household atmosphere than it can possibly return in scaled score points.

If any of that is happening, stopping for a fortnight is a legitimate and often excellent decision. Nothing in KS2 SATs is worth a miserable spring.