Sats: KS2 Year 6 reading paper revealed after row over difficulty

The contents of last week’s grade 6 reading paper was published After some teachers and parents said it was so hard that the children cried.

One question asked 10- and 11-year-olds to find a word similar to “eat” in a passage that contained both “consume” and “feed.”

Even the staff had to “really think about the answers,” the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) said.

The Department of Education (DfE) said the sats had been “rigorously tested”.

The test materials and scoring schemes were due to be released on Monday – but the Standards and Testing Agency (STA) said it would make them available early “due to public interest in the tests”.

BBC News received a copy of the paper on Wednesday and was able to view the questions ahead of their publication.

Concerns were raised about its length and complexity, and some parents and teachers reported that children were unable to finish it.

The paper has fueled debate among teachers and parents about the purpose of sats.

In the test, the children had one hour to answer 38 questions on three given texts.

The first was an excerpt from a story about friends who think they’ve encountered sheep farmers – a word used in the text to mean someone who steals animals from farms.

Another was an interview about bats in Texas based on a 2016 New York Times article.

The last passage is from a book called The Rise of Wolves.

A school principal named three of what she thought were the most difficult questions before she saw the grading scheme in a phone call to BBC News on Wednesday.

question 17

Look at the beginning of Harriet’s answer It’s actually very fitting…

Find And copy one Word closest in meaning to “eat”.

Relevant excerpt: It’s actually very fitting that you call it a “hotspot”. The gaps under the bridge are an ideal place for mother bats to raise their young. Bat babies are born hairless and only have a few months to develop before migrating south in the fall. They need a warm and safe place and the gaps under the bridge are just the right width to seal in the heat well. These young bats must expend their energy growing, not keeping warm.

Texas, in general, is a paradise for bats because of its delicious insects. A mother bat hunts every evening and consumes about two-thirds of its body weight on insects each night to meet its energy needs. The feeding frenzy can last all night.

Answer: The teacher was concerned that the answer was ‘consume’, but many children would have written ‘feed’. According to the grading scheme, both answers were acceptable.

question 8

She crawled back into the tent…

What does that tell you about how Priya got into the tent? Tick one.

Answer: The answer was that she had to squeeze in, but the teacher believed that many children had wormed their way in.

question 13

Look at the first two paragraphs.

In which American state is the Congress Avenue Bridge located?

Relevant excerpt: During the day, the Congress Avenue Bridge in the city of Austin couldn’t look more normal: a grey, drab downtown street bridge. At night it is the scene of one of the most amazing shows that nature has to offer. More than a million bats live on the underside of the bridge, and every summer evening they all swarm out at once and soar into the city sky like a tornado before spreading in all directions like clouds of smoke. Standing on the bridge, you might even feel the wind on their wings as they pass by.

Austin is the capital of the state of Texas in the United States, but also the bat capital of North America. The Bats Under the Bridge attracts thousands of visitors each year, and every August, enthusiasts celebrate the Bat Festival on the Bridge in their honor.

Answer: The answer is Texas, but the teacher told us that the kids probably wouldn’t be familiar enough with American geography to know that Austin isn’t a state.

Joe Saunders, from West Sussex, said his son Alfie doesn’t usually talk too much about school at the end of the day but wanted “right away” to tell his parents about the Sats newspaper last Wednesday.

“Alfie, especially in his case, went into it after doing really well in all his drills. He passed all his reading tests. So he had no concerns that he wouldn’t make it,” he said.

“Of the 15 or 20 jobs he’s done in the past few months, the only one he hasn’t finished or couldn’t finish last week gives the impression that something went wrong with that job.” “

Simon Kidwell, NAHT vice-president and headmaster at Hartford Manor Primary School and Nursery in Cheshire, said the children “went home with great difficulty because they had not completed the reading test”.

“The staff really had to think about how they were going to answer those questions. So it was clearly quite a challenging and complex paper,” he said.

When asked how difficult he thought sats essays should be, he said, “kids should be able to complete them.”

NAHT has raised concerns with the STA, which carries out assessments, and Ofqual, England’s examinations regulator.

Gillian Hillier, chief executive of the STA, said this year’s papers were “tested with thousands of students” last April and developed over “at least three years”.

“We use a rigorous and robust set of processes to ensure testing is appropriate and fair, including assessments by teachers, curriculum and inclusion experts and other education professionals,” she said.

Measures have been taken to “ensure that each test is of a similar difficulty level to the tests in previous years,” she added.

“As every year, we will use data from the assessed tests and exams to ensure that the score required to meet the expected standard reflects the relative difficulty of the test,” Ms Hillier said.

“We will continue to work with schools, unions and other stakeholders to understand their views on the papers this year and on all aspects of elementary school assessment.”

Another teachers’ union, the Association of School and College Leaders, said sats “cause many students and teachers to feel stressed and anxious.”

“The current system is too narrow in focus, does not reflect the comprehensive curriculum that teachers and leaders want to offer, and places too much emphasis on a single set of outcomes achieved in a single week,” the ASCL said.

A DfE spokesman said sats are “an important tool to identify students’ strengths and where they may have fallen behind as they progress to secondary school.”

Standard Assessment Tests or Sats are tests that children take in Year 6 at the end of Key Level 2. These are national curriculum assessments in English grammar, punctuation and spelling, English reading and mathematics.

According to the state standards and testing agency, Sats tests are intended to:

Children also complete sophomore sats, at the end of Key Stage 1.

Additional reporting by Alice Evans.

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