On Tuesday, we found out the KS2 SATs results for 2023. Amongst the celebrations (and we wholeheartedly advise many celebrations!), we’re also wondering how learners fared, what these results tell us, and what these results might reveal about the support landscape learners are experiencing in 2023. 

Join SP for a timeline of the morning as it happened. 

8:00am– Scaled Scores have been released. What are Scaled Scores and what can they tell us?  

The Department for Education released the KS2 Scaled Scores for 2023 early in the morning of the 11th of July. These are the marks that learners need to achieve the government’s ‘expected’ score. To meet government expectations, pupils must achieve a total of 100 in their scaled scores, but this equates to different marks for each paper and can change each year.  

Converting a pupil’s raw score to a scaled score simply requires looking up the raw score on a table available at the KS2 SATs Scaled Scores at .GOV.  

The marks required for 2023 are:  

• Maths: 56 out of 110 (down from 58 in 2022)  
• Reading: 24 out of 50 (down from 29 in 2022)  
• Grammar, punctuation and spelling: 36 out of 70 (up from 35 in 2022)  

Expectations are very slightly higher in the grammar, punctuation and spelling paper, but this might be reflective an expected uptick in skill or, as suggested by some educators on social media this morning, be a compensatory measure for the scores that have taken a dip in maths and reading. This might reveal that when the national averages release, we could expect to see some pronounced valleys in the scores achieved across the board in these two subjects.  

For many educators, however, it’s the 5-point dive in the expected reading score that’s the most interesting.  

9:00am– Educators on Twitter talking about that KS2 Reading Paper 

A quick scout around Twitter reveals that educators are making some fairly damning connections between the reading paper pass mark and the calibre of the KS2 Reading paper that was delivered to learners earlier this year. It was a controversial move that led to educators and education agencies calling for full-scale testing reform – but what were the issues with the exam? 

2023’s Reading SAT was thought to be one of the hardest ever administered, largely in terms of its reading time to writing time ratio. The standard delivery paper was an hour long (although many learners will have accommodations that add extra time to the process) and expected learners to read a total of 2,106 words across three separate texts. Add to this the 1,337 words contained in the question paper, it meant that learners reading at an average speed (around 90 words a minute) would spend around 39 minutes and 30 seconds reading the paper.   

That would have left them a grand total of 21 minutes and 30 seconds to answer 38 questions, for a total of 50 marks across the paper… which leaves learners in a landscape where they’re trying to score a mark about once every 25 seconds.   

It’s been highlighted by the UK press that in a paper delivered to 10–11-year-olds, one of the books chosen (The Rise of Wolves by Kerr Thomson) had a reading age of 13+, meaning that there was a skills gap emergent for all but the most above-average learners before the time breakdown even came into play.   

Also, the results gateway appears to be struggling to cope with the increase in traffic, with widespread reports on an outage from the teaching community across Twitter and LinkedIn.   

10:30am– National averages have dropped in reading.  

National averages have been released, and it’s as many have predicted: reading paper scores have seen a pronounced drop in 2023. Results show 73% of pupils met the expected standards in reading, down from 75% in 2022. A 2% dip might not seem like a lot, but in reality, that’s around 32,642 learners.  

It may be a result of the paper and its high reading expectations, but it might also be part of a trifecta of other forces acting on learner reading that have the potential to impact scores. 

• Material deprivation: widespread economic downturn, mortgage spikes, and the higher price of bills and staples means more households are living in poverty in the UK. This means more KS2 students will find reading materials harder to come by, especially compelling ones that reflect their personal interests.   
• Pandemic learning loss: we may be well out of pandemic learning conditions, but the pandemic will still have had a powerful effect on the skills garnered by these KS2 learners over the past three years. Reading skills were one of the areas hardest hit, with learners with dyslexia and SEND students representing a specific subgroup of learners whose marks have been impacted the most. 
• Student mental health: learners have been under more stress than ever before, and anxious learners don’t always perform their best in exams. From increased pressure due to learning recovery targets to a hike in exam anxiety, hugely compromised social lives and overall security and stability, this isn’t necessarily a group of learners that are feeling their best.  

It’s worth noting that a number of these factors will be impacting cross-subject, however, and there have been gains in maths (2% on 2022), writing (up 3% on 2022) and an even break in grammar, spelling and punctuation (the same as in 2022). You can find out more at the BBC.  

11.30am: What have the responses been like?  

We’d like to offer a heartfelt congratulations to everybody who received their results this week. It’s a huge achievement, especially considering how the last three years in education have panned out, and it’s time to celebrate each and every triumph: you’ve all done amazingly, and we’re saying that to the educators, too! 

Official commentary on the results is largely focusing on learning loss. 

"Although the immediate disruption of the pandemic has passed, the impact it had on younger cohorts may remain with us for some years yet.”  

– Jon Andrews, Head of Analysis at Education Policy Institute   

There’s a mix of emotions emerging. There’s a definite sense of relief, even though these results haven’t seen solid rises and there’s been a definite impact on reading achievement: they’re not demonstrating a cross-subject slide and many learners will be pleased with their results. Although there are still areas in which we need to vitally improve and further support learners, things remain largely unchanged since 2022, according to a lot of commentators. 

But there is a shadow side. Although these results aren’t too different from those gained in 2022, most are still pointing out that these results are at a major slump compared to results from 2017, 2018 and 2019. This cohort of learners will have been in years 3 and 4 during the height of the Covid-19 situation and it’s clearly still having an impact, indicating that learners who need support might be struggling to access it, and that educator bandwidth is likely quite compromised.   

Press Roundup: KS2 SATs Results 2023 in the news  

‘No rise towards pre-Covid levels’– TES Magazine 

‘Reading standards fall in Year 6 tests’ – BBC Education  

‘Overall results of KS2 SATs ‘unchanged’ since last year’ – Twinkl Digest