Expert guides written by our teaching team, all completely free.
A complete parent guide to grammar school preparation, exam boards, and timelines.
Everything about the Year 6 SATs: what they test and how to help.
The topics that matter most and how to approach revision.
Understanding dyslexia, the signs to look for, and how specialist tuition helps.
What each stage actually involves, and the free material we point our own families towards. Everything here is free and hosted by the organisation that made it.
The focus is phonics, reading fluency and early number. Children sit the phonics screening check in Year 1, and are teacher-assessed at the end of Year 2. The most useful thing you can do at home is read together daily and practise number bonds to 20 until they are instant.
Times tables become critical here: there is a multiplication tables check in Year 4, and fluency with tables underpins almost everything in Year 5 and 6 maths. Year 6 ends with SATs in May, covering reading, grammar and punctuation, and maths.
There are no national tests at KS3, which is exactly why it is the easiest place to quietly fall behind. Gaps that open in Year 7 and 8 algebra tend to surface as GCSE problems two years later. It is the cheapest time to fix things.
GCSEs are graded 9 to 1, with grade 4 a standard pass and 5 a strong pass. Past papers are the single most effective revision tool, but only when used properly: sit one under timed conditions, mark it honestly, then work on the topics you lost marks in rather than sitting another paper straight away.
Families in Redbridge typically sit either the Essex CSSE exam or a grammar school's own paper, and the timeline starts earlier than most parents expect. Registration usually falls in the spring or early summer of Year 5, well before the exam itself.
Year 6 SATs are sat in May and reported as scaled scores, where 100 is the expected standard. They matter less than most parents fear, but secondary schools do use them for setting, so it is worth going in prepared rather than panicked.