My year group were the first wave of students sitting the SATs exams in the mid 1990's. SATs stands for Statutory Assessment Tests. It was the commencement of government policy to introduce more testing and examinations into our school education system.
Now 20-years on, SATs appear to be headline news and have accumulated a halo of more relevance than it really deserves. Teachers frequently refer to SATs, some franchise tuition centres drum-up SATs, and in turn...young students & parents are misled by the intended purposes of SATs.
To help students & parents navigate through this...I am going to say...
"Instead, concentrate on focusing your time & resources on achieving strong learning & delivering results on examinations that have a high impact on the potential trajectory of your child".
Examples of such critical junctures are their 11+ exams, their GCSEs, their A-Levels, other formal qualifications AND other extracurricular achievements that they can carry and are visible to others.
SATs are NOT formal qualifications - future employers have no access to your child(ren) scores. The government introduced SATs to test the students ability as a measure of your school's quality of teaching! So please don't get too anxious about SATs. Instead, tell your children to view SATs as opportunities to show-off to the government how good they are!
On the otherhand, try not to deliberately flunk your SAT exams. Some schools use their results to segregate students between ability groups and 'sets'. ['Sets' is another debate for another time]....so we encourage your child to relax and have fun annihilating their SATs paper!
In fact, if your child has been making preparations to achieve well at their 11+, GCSEs...etc we are confident they will have nothing to worry about.
At Algebrains, we like to encourage your children to challenge their perspective of events and issues around them. Our maths courses have sprinkles of financial applications...and we also offer financial training to lift your children's financial vocabulary. Contact us to see how we can help: www.algebrains.com
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