Is it just me but these examples from the mark scheme from this year’s SATs test further prove just how pointless these tests are?

Having been a SATs marker in the past, I can confirm that, sadly, the mark schemes have always been this pedantic. In our training we were told to 'reward what the children have achieved' only to then go through the mark scheme and be told what wasn't acceptable as a response!

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Does it help the child progress through their educational journey? I’m going to say no, there are other ways to help children do this.

Ex Y6 teacher here. When they first came in, in the mid 90s, they were so low key. Quite a few children misunderstood the word ‘calculate’ as having to use a calculator! IMO standards were higher pre SATs, and of course the topic based approach! Oh the joys. Thank you, Mr P.

I feel kids now have to guess what was in the question setter’s head and obviously that won’t happen when the scheme is pedantic and I personally feel incorrect!

Soo pedantic… yet we still need to go though the process of checking the children get their names correctly and date of birth correct after bagging up each test! And they still allow themselves to make grammatical errors (like missing a word out in instructions for Q11)! 😡

Genuinely what’s the point

love this. But also, setting up a system of such publicly overt, superficial, number-based competition between schools (though now normalised) was a catastrophe, because so much is in the DEMOGRAPHIC, not the teaching (& Media moronic, so public don't understand)

I’m not sure I get the comparison with children who have visited a beach. In life you need to be able to comprehend even if you have no experience of something surely. And, while I agree with you on every other point, it’s just the same argument we’ve heard over and over again.

Wow that’s a lot of money being spent in ineffective systems. Makes a lot of sense just to let leadership/ teachers get on with it. Perhaps we need a DOGE operation to take out contracts / bin Ofsted etc all out costs which isn’t producing anything tangible for children.

As a year 6 teacher, this is absolutely heartbreaking