Year 6 SATs Practice Online — Know Exactly Where Your Child Stands

SATs Are in May. Here Is What You Need to Know Right Now.

KS2 SATs 2027 take place from Monday 10 May to Thursday 13 May 2027. Every Year 6 child in state-funded primary schools in England will sit six papers across four days. Full SATs 2027 date and format guide →

If your child is currently in Year 6, you have around nine months. That is enough time — but not with a vague plan of "doing some revision." It is enough time with a specific, daily practice routine that targets the exact topics where your child is dropping marks.

The difference between a child who reaches May 2027 feeling confident and one who feels panicked is almost always this: the confident child has been practising consistently and their parent has known where they stand throughout the year — not just in April when it is too late to change much.

What KS2 SATs Actually Test

Six papers across four days. Here is what each one assesses:

Monday 10 May — GPS Papers 1 and 2

GPS Paper 1 (approximately 45 minutes) tests Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling knowledge — identifying grammatical terms, applying punctuation rules, understanding formal and informal language, recognising sentence types and structures.

GPS Paper 2 (approximately 20 minutes) is a Spelling test — 20 words dictated by the teacher from the Year 5/6 statutory spelling list.

GPS is the paper most parents feel least equipped to help with because it uses specific grammatical terminology — subjunctive form, passive voice, relative clauses, modal verbs — that few adults were explicitly taught. The good news: these terms are learnable and Scholaria covers every one of them with targeted practice.

Tuesday 11 May — English Reading

One paper, 60 minutes, 50 marks. Three reading passages — typically fiction, non-fiction and poetry or a hybrid text. Questions progress from retrieval (find information stated in the text) through vocabulary (what does this word suggest?) to inference (what does the author imply?) and evaluation (how effectively does the author create tension?).

The reading paper is where children most commonly underperform relative to their actual ability. The reason is almost always one of two things: running out of time, or giving answers not supported by evidence from the text. Both are fixable with practice. Scholaria's comprehension sessions use the PEE framework — Point, Evidence, Explanation — which is the structure that eliminates unsupported answers.

Wednesday 12 May — Maths Papers 1 and 2

Paper 1 (Arithmetic) — 30 minutes, 40 marks, no calculator. Pure calculation speed and accuracy — addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, decimals, percentages, order of operations. Every question is a direct calculation with no context or problem solving.

Paper 2 (Reasoning) — 40 minutes, 35 marks. Tests the ability to apply maths to worded problems and multi-step calculations.

Many children who understand maths conceptually lose marks on Paper 1 because they are slow at written methods. Speed at arithmetic is built through repetition — there is no shortcut, but consistent daily practice builds it reliably.

Thursday 13 May — Maths Paper 3

Paper 3 (Reasoning) — 40 minutes, 35 marks. Calculator not permitted. Data interpretation, geometry and statistics alongside further worded problems.

The reasoning papers require a different skill from arithmetic — the ability to read a problem carefully, identify what is being asked, choose the right method, and show working. Children who cannot identify what a question is asking lose marks even when they know the maths. Teaching children to underline key words and check whether a question asks for one thing or two is one of the highest-impact interventions for the reasoning papers.

The Six Topics Where Year 6 Children Drop the Most Marks

Based on national SATs performance patterns, these are the topics where children most commonly underperform:

• Fractions, Decimals and Percentages — converting between all three representations, adding and subtracting fractions with different denominators, multiplying fractions, finding percentages of amounts. This topic cluster appears in every SATs paper and is consistently the area of greatest weakness.
• Ratio and Proportion — scale factors, relative sizes, percentage problems involving proportional reasoning. Introduced in Year 5 and tested heavily — many children have not had sufficient practice.
• Inference in Reading — answering questions about what the author implies rather than what is stated. Children who have not been taught to justify answers with text evidence consistently lose marks here.
• GPS — Subjunctive Form and Passive Voice — two specific grammatical concepts that appear regularly in the GPS paper and confuse children who have not encountered them repeatedly in context.
• Multi-Step Word Problems — problems requiring two or more calculations in sequence. Many children identify the right method for the first step but do not complete the second.
• Area and Perimeter of Compound Shapes — a reliable source of dropped marks in the reasoning papers, particularly for L-shaped and irregular compound shapes where children need to identify missing measurements before calculating.

Scholaria tracks accuracy on topics like these individually on the parent dashboard, so you can see at a glance which of them needs attention this week — not just an overall grade.

SATs Mock Papers — Practice the Full Experience

One of the most important things a Year 6 child can do before May is sit full-length timed SATs mock papers under realistic conditions. Not to identify right and wrong answers — to build stamina, time awareness and familiarity with the format.

Children who have sat several full mock papers before SATs week arrive at the real test feeling like they have done this before. Children who have only done topic-based practice find the 60-minute reading paper or the back-to-back reasoning papers more demanding than they expected.

Scholaria includes 40 SATs-format mock papers for every paper — Reading, GPS Paper 1, GPS Paper 2, and Maths Papers 1 to 3 — printable at home, with the full mark scheme included. Sit one, print it, time it under real conditions, then mark it together against the mark scheme. That's enough for a child never to sit the same paper twice. One complete set is free on every account; the full library comes with a paid plan. See what's inside Scholaria →

This is what makes mock papers genuinely useful rather than just a measure of anxiety. Marking a paper together and talking through exactly which questions were missed — and which topic they belong to — turns a score into something actionable, not just a number.

Knowing Where Your Child Stands

Every Scholaria session updates the parent dashboard — topic-by-topic accuracy across Maths and English, a recommended focus area based on where marks are actually being lost, current streak, and recent session results. It's a live, specific picture rather than a single predicted grade, and it changes as your child practises.

What it gives you is something no end-of-term report provides: a current, accurate picture of where your child stands right now, specific enough to be actionable. Read what "SATs-ready" actually means →

How Scholaria Supports Year 6 Children

• Daily 10-15 minute sessions. Short enough not to feel like homework, consistent enough to build real progress. Each session includes core Maths and English practice plus a short Word Bank review.
• Adaptive difficulty. Foundation, Core and Extension questions for every topic. A child who is Extension on arithmetic but Foundation on ratio gets harder arithmetic questions and easier ratio questions — not uniform difficulty across the board.
• Printable mock papers with a full mark scheme. SATs-format papers for every subject, printable at home, each with a mark scheme to mark it together.
• The Year 5/6 statutory spelling list. All 100 words from the DfE statutory list are built into the Word Bank with spaced repetition.
• A short recap most evenings. Around 7pm, an email recaps what your child practised that day — or gently nudges if a session's still due — so you're never guessing what happened without opening the dashboard.

The SATs Preparation Timeline — Year 6