The Best Way To Prepare For Sats: A Whole School Approach

Hello, and my name is Sam Adams and I'm here to talk to you today about the best way to prepare for sats and looking at a whole school approach. Before we get onto that, just a little bit about myself, my background. I was a maths subject leader. I was also a primary maths teacher. I've worked right the way through the age range from foundation, started in foundation and finished in year six. I've also done some recent supply work so that I've also worked in year five and year six and prepared a number of children for sats. I'm now working as an external consultant, but I do still work with teachers and I still deal work, still work from foundation through to year six. Okay, so we're looking at the whole school approach. That may be a very odd thing to think about because some people go, well, year six, it's year six, that's. It's year six, that's. But actually it's not. It's key stage two sats. Key stage two sats cover things from year three right the way through to year six. That's the first thing to say. But there are certain things that we're looking at across the school that I think will help children to be ready. SATs ready in May in their year six. Things like this big message at the moment is to slow the curriculum down. In the past, we've rushed through things far too quickly. We've gone for coverage rather than mastery. Mastery is the big thing at the moment. Our children are secure in what they do. Can they apply it? Do they understand the concepts? Can they explain the concepts? Have they got that deeper learning? If we look for coverage, we're moving from one subject to another subject far too quickly. And in fact, foundation stage is probably one of the best places to start with this, because in terms of their coverage and in terms of their fluency and in terms of how they operate their curriculum, we see that that curriculum is slowed down and it just means children have much more control of their maths. Moving into year one, do we have a whole school plan? What do we use in terms of planning? How do we plan? Do we plan in blocks? Are we looking at two or three week units or four week units or possibly even five week units rather than one week units and then move on to something else? Ideally, we won't be plugging gaps. A phrase I hear quite a lot from year six teachers is I'm plugging the gaps that have come from previous year groups. We don't want to be plugging gaps. We want children to be secure from foundation stage right the way through to the end, end of year five. So when we hit year six, we're at a point where the children can be confident and secure and indeed their teachers can be confident and secure in their curriculum and not a previous curriculum. One whole school approach that has worked particularly well is a speaking and listening approach. We've said to children right the way from foundation stage right the way up to year six, quite early in the autumn term, that we are really pushing two questions. And those two questions are how and why? How do you know with young children, how do you know that that answer is four? Why can't it be six? And hopefully the children will explain exactly how they know the answer is four and why it can't possibly be six. We want the children to respond in mathematical sentences and we give them prompts. Those prompts start with I think because da, da, da, da da. I know da da da because I predict, which is a good one to get children to think about. Predict, estimate, because da da, da, da da. We've had incidences in Key Stage 1 where children have said, I think no, they've said, I know, I know the answer is ba, ba, ba, because. So they've actually made a progression within the course of that lesson and they've got a better understanding of the content of the curriculum they're working with. The other elements we're looking for are words like reason and justify and explain and be systematic. Being systematic is absolutely key in mathematics and I like the idea of getting children to think about what comes first, what comes next, what comes next, and finally what do we do? And it's that kind of language. First do this, then do this, then do this. And finally we had a situation with a year five boy recently in a primary school who was sitting, working through a problem and, and he was doing this and I said, hello, what are you doing? He went, I'm being systematic. And he was, he was being systematic. He was looking at how to go through the steps in order to respond to a question. And up here we've got ecc, estimate, calculate, check. Children do not like estimating, they do not like checking. They need to understand that those two things are vital for getting a clear understanding of an answer and a good guess. Not just an estimate, but a good estimate that can be started in the foundation stage and worked on right way through key stage one and right the way through key stage two. So it becomes second nature. The tech model, TECH stands for torque, estimate, calculate, check. So we're including those ECC bits in this problem, we tend to use this more in key stage two. We've used it across year three into year six. The children have a problem to solve in the centre. They then talk about the problem and they might look at things like is it in the right unit? What would the answer look like? Is the answer going to be a measure? If it is a measure, will it be millilitres or litres or pounds? The question might be all in millilitres and the answer might be in litres. So the children need to understand they have to make a change. If they sign their thinking in that top left hand box, we've then got a good baseline assessment of what children can do, what they know and what they understand and then just working through ecc and that's why we have the arrows. We want the children to understand this is a process and we can slow things down. Going back to that first slide, we're slowing things down so children understand what they're doing. And in the best case, a year five girl said recently, she said, oh, it all links, doesn't it? Everything links. I said what do you mean? What do you mean? And she said, well, you start here, you do all your thinking, you're talking, that helps you with your guess, that helps you work out your answer, that helps you to check it and then we can go back and talk about our think talk and see if we got it right. I thought what a great answer. I like that a lot. There are some must haves, some really key things that you would expect to see across the school. In Key Stage 1, children must know their number bonds, they must be really clear on the number bonds and you can do things like playing ping pong. So you might say to the children, we're going to play a game and we go ping pong, ping pong. If I say seven, I want the children to respond with three bonds to 10. So we have seven, three, six, four, eight, two, one, nine. And it should be rapid, it should be instant. Children need to know their times tables and the related division facts by the end of year four. We need to practice those constantly. Those are a must have, non negotiable, if you like, things that children should be doing all the time, constantly. And if we can get home support as well with that, that's even better. And the big one, which for me is a really interesting one because it's not actually in the national curriculum per se, it's in the non statutory guidance in year two which means that teachers don't have to do it. But I think it's really important that we do is partitioning numbers in different ways. So children understand that If I partition 34, it's not just three tens and four ones, it's two tens and 14 ones, or one ten and 24 ones. That will help them later when they're using subtraction and used in decomposition so they understand how a number is put together. That for me is really key. So that's why I've put that in bold. The other thing we talked about whole school approaches right at the beginning, Whole school approach with your calculation policy, what does your calculation policy actually cover? What does it look like? The national curriculum is pretty good at telling you what to do or telling you what to do, not necessarily how to do it. So it's important that we understand the sorts of strategies that we want the children to use. This policy is just an example from a school that I'm working with. So we have objectives down the left. We have mental recall in year two. This is what we want the children to be able to do fairly quickly. What strategies are we teaching? What strategies are the children using in year two to be confident and have built on from year one? And then your written methods go down the right hand side. Every year group has that for addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. And for this school they also have a section on fractions and link that into division as well. The other really important thing is if you have a calculation policy, does it have a foundation stage section? Because it should. If it's a whole school approach, foundation stage should also have their input at the start of the policy too. Classroom environment, what sort of things are we doing to promote things like vocabulary? To promote things like the basics? The basics are fluency. Fluency approaches. Can the children do this? The national curriculum statements, national curriculum objectives and then problem solving and reasoning. I think it's really important that as a school we make a decision as to how we're going to promote our classroom environment. Our working wall, if you like, and I like the idea, nice and simple. Three sections. Vocabulary, signs and symbols. Your add sign goes there, your equal sign goes there. Possibly with younger children, you might color code. So everything in add is blue, everything in subtract is green. The basics, we'll put those in a logical order for children and we'll make sure they understand one step before they move on to the next. And we'll give them a chance to properly reason and problem solve. And the working wall. The classroom environment will reflect the unit of work that we're doing. So that wall will stay up for three or four weeks and. And will benefit the children, teachers, teaching assistants, so the children are able to talk it through and understand how that works as a classroom resource, not just a piece of wallpaper. So, finally, in terms of your next steps, as a result of this seminar, this webinar planning, the pineapple approach. It's called the Pineapple approach. I looked at this the other night, I couldn't remember what the pineapple approach was. And it came to me. Chunks, large chunks. We should be doing the curriculum in large chunks. We shouldn't be skitting from one place to another. One week on this, one week on that, one week on something else. Large chunks. Four or five weeks on addition and subtraction, maybe four or five weeks on shape properties, four or five weeks on statistics. Remember, most year groups have got six strands, six strands across the year, six strands, six half terms. So you're looking on average at sort of five or six weeks per strand. If you think of it like that, then it's doable. I would suggest we need to develop fluency as a national curriculum expectation. We need to develop children's fluency in calculations. Yes, but we need to get them to understand there is a link from one element of maths to another, from one strand to another. Fractions is a perfect example. Fractions. Half past ten. Have teachers made that link from time to fractions? Half a kilogram with measures. Measures, again, if you think about a number line, if we put 0, quarter, a half, 3 quarters, the measure from one space to another is identical. Do children understand that? Symmetry? Half a shape. Are we making those links so that children can make those links? The other thing is challenge and resilience. We want the children to be confident with the maths, but we also want to set enough of a challenge to. So that the stuff we do is not easy, if you like, not straightforward. And one of the best examples of that recently was a key stage one classroom. And one of the children said, this is really quite tough. I said, yeah. Is it impossible? Oh, no, it's not impossible. It's just really quite tough. And I quite like that. I quite like the idea. They were going to give it a proper go on this investigation and they came up with a result at the end of it. Resilience, I think, is key majority. And finally, do speak to us to find out more about approaching sats effectively as a whole school. And we have our contact details there at Third Space Learning. Thank you very much for listening to this. And I hope it's been of benefit to you.