KS2 SATs 2025: 5 Key Takeaways

We're back with another stats blog. Here's our comprehensive analysis of the 2025 Key Stage 2 maths SATs papers. If you're wondering what changed this year and how to prepare for 2026, you're in the right place. I'm going to share the key findings from our Question Level Analysis blog that every Year six teacher and school leader needs to know first the good news after the dreaded cliff edge questions in previous years, the 2025 papers saw a much more gradual increase in difficulty. However, trickier questions did appear earlier than expected, so make sure you prepare your pupils to expect questions in any order. In our annual SATS survey, teachers agreed that Reasoning Paper two remained the most challenging, but overall the papers felt more manageable. Looking at content coverage, we can see that this year year six content dropped from 48% to just 42%, while year five content jumped significantly from 19% to 27%. This means 58% of marks came from years three to five content enough for pupils to potentially reach the expected standard without any year 6 content exposure. This trend suggests pupils need strong foundations from previous year groups more than ever. Unsurprisingly, number and place value paired with calculations dominated content coverage, covering 46% of all questions, while shape questions dropped to just 3%. In the reasoning papers, measurement had its highest percentage in years, covering 15% of questions, while fractions, decimals and percentages dropped to its lowest coverage, also at 15%. Looking at the arithmetic paper, it's becoming increasingly apparent that it follows an exact formula with specific question types. You can prepare your pupils to expect 17 to 18 calculation questions, nine fraction questions covering the four operations plus four to five decimal questions, and two to four percentage problems. Interestingly, this year featured more two mark questions than previously. There were 11 two mark questions compared to just eight in 2024. Now that we've looked at what was there, let's look at what was missing. Several topics were completely absent this year, surprisingly missing number problems, also Roman numerals, perimeter and area, and the mean. These could easily return in 2026, so don't skip them in your planning. If you want the complete breakdown with all the statistics and preparation tips, download our free analysis guide using the link in the blog. And don't forget to subscribe to the Maths Hub for access to hundreds of free SATS resources.