What are KS2 SATs?

KS2 SATs are national curriculum tests taken by children in Year 6, usually in the middle of May. They cover maths, grammar and punctuation, spelling, and reading.

The short version

KS2 stands for Key Stage 2 — Years 3 to 6 of primary school in England. SATs (Standard Assessment Tests) are sat in the final year, Year 6, when most children are 10 or 11.

There are six papers in total, spread over four mornings in one week in May. They are marked externally, not by your child's own teacher, and results come back to the school in July.

They are used to measure the school as much as the child. That is worth saying plainly, because it shapes how much weight a family should put on them.

Which subjects are tested

Maths — three papers: one arithmetic paper and two reasoning papers.

English grammar, punctuation and spelling — often shortened to GPS or SPaG. Two papers: a questions paper and a spelling test.

English reading — one paper, based on a booklet of three texts.

There is no separate writing test. Writing is assessed by teachers across the year. Science is only tested in a small sample of schools each year, so most children never sit a science SAT.

How they are marked

Each paper gives a raw mark. Those are converted into a scaled score between 80 and 120, where 100 is the expected standard.

The conversion changes slightly every year so that a given scaled score means the same thing regardless of whether that year's paper was harder or easier. This is why you cannot work out a scaled score from a past paper with any precision.

You will get your child's scaled scores, and whether they met the expected standard, in their end-of-year report.

How much do they actually matter?

Honestly: less than the anxiety around them suggests. Secondary schools in England do not use SATs results to decide admissions — places are allocated before the tests are even sat.

Some secondaries use the results for initial setting, and many re-test in the first term anyway. The results matter most to the primary school, which is judged on them.

The useful framing for a family is that SATs are a checkpoint, not a verdict. Preparation that builds genuine confidence in arithmetic and reading is worth doing. Preparation that makes a 10-year-old dread May is not.