Year 6 SATs Preparation: A Parent's Guide to the KS2 Tests
What's in the Year 6 SATs papers — maths arithmetic and reasoning, reading, SPaG — how scaled scores work, and how to prepare your child without the stress.
What the SATs actually involve
Year 6 children sit their Key Stage 2 SATs in May: a grammar, punctuation and spelling test (SPaG), a reading test, and three maths papers — one arithmetic and two reasoning. Raw marks convert to a scaled score where 100 is the expected standard and 110+ counts as working at greater depth.
Maths: arithmetic is the quick win
The arithmetic paper is 36 questions of pure calculation — long multiplication and division, fractions, decimals and percentages. It's the most coachable paper of the lot: the question types are completely predictable, so ten minutes of daily practice reliably moves scores.
Reasoning papers wrap the same maths in word problems. The skill to practise is extracting the calculation from the story — encourage your child to underline the numbers and the question being asked before touching the working.
Reading and spelling
The reading paper gives three texts and about an hour — time pressure is the real challenge. Practise finding answers in the text and quoting evidence rather than answering from memory. For spelling, little-and-often testing of the Year 5/6 statutory word list beats last-minute cramming.
Keeping it low-stress
Short, regular, game-like practice works far better at this age than long sessions. Celebrate effort and improvement rather than scores, keep sessions under 20 minutes, and stop revision entirely the day before each test — a rested child scores better than a crammed one.
Practise with real exam-style questions
Reading only gets you so far — the fastest way to pass is answering questions under exam conditions. The Revise Right app has 855 SATs (Year 6) and 250 11+ questions with full teaching explanations, free on iOS and Android.