21 Best Free Year 6 SATs 2023 Revision Resources (Maths)

Once again SATs season is fast approaching and we’re all on the lookout for high quality free Year 6 SATs revision resources, KS2 SATs papers, tests and sample SATs questions to support our Year 6 in the run up to the National Assessments in May.

While the cornerstone of effective teaching and progress in maths will always be effective subject teaching, at this time of year, if you’re a Year 6 teacher tasked with improving on previous SATs results you’d be forgiven for thinking that it’s all about the national assessments and effective test preparation.

We can’t do it alone but there is help available. Here is our run down of the many excellent free Key Stage 2 SATs revision resources available to help you support your pupils to achieve the marks they deserve without resorting the expensive CGP workbooks.

Part 1 is all the free Year 6 SATs revision resources available from Third Space Learning.

Part 2 is a collection of our favourite free KS2 maths SATs revision resources and useful links from elsewhere to help build stamina in maths.

Hope you find something useful that you didn’t know about before. Do tell us about it and share the blog if so.

If you’re looking for KS2 English SATs resources, this article on teaching year 6 has some good ideas to help you with your year 6 English revision including tips for SPAG work and reading comprehensions in the run up to SATs.

Short on time? Find the information/resource you’re looking for quickly:

Third Space Year 6 SATs Revision Resources – Maths

1. Free SATs Practice Papers

We’re starting and ending with these much requested free SATs papers, with answers and mark schemes.

First up, if you haven’t downloaded the two sets of free year 6 SATs maths papers you’re missing a trick:

We’ve had almost 50,000 downloads of these SATs practice papers in total and received lots of comments like ‘these are the best papers I’ve ever seen’. A definite boon for Spring term planning, you’ll end up with 4 reasoning papers and 2 arithmetic papers of guaranteed Key Stage 2 SATs standard.

2. Topic Based SATs Questions

Often you just want a collection of KS2 SATs questions by topic so now rather than creating them yourselves, we’ve gathered together 75 of these questions into practice tests suitable for Year 5 and Year 6:

KS2 SATs Place Value Questions and Test

KS2 SATS Addition and Subtraction Questions and Test

KS2 Fractions, Percentages and Decimals Questions and Test 

You can pick and choose from these practice questions or use the tests diagnostically by asking your pupils to work through the entire test in order to reveal their concept gaps.

3. SATs Revision Guide 

For anyone teaching Year 6 this SATs Revision Guide for Year 6 Teachers and SLT includes the strategies and techniques that have worked with many years of Headteacher Claire Lotriet’s Year 6s. This revision book includes everything you need to know about how to boil down an algorithm, what the problem solving cycle looks like and why you should be doing 5 a day if you’re not already!

4. Fluent in Five – daily arithmetic

No list of the best free SATs revision resources is complete without a link to the most popular Third Space resource for daily arithmetic for Year 6 SATs. If you haven’t already downloaded Fluent in Five weeks 1-6, do so now! 5 or more questions a day on four operations to develop fast arithmetic skills.

This resource has been especially valuable recently when there’s been so much emphasis on catch up maths. It’s a quick and easy way to find out where there are fluency gaps that filling, and which topics you may want to spend a little more time on (times tables anyone?).

5. Rapid Reasoning – 360 reasoning questions

Targeted squarely at those pupils who struggle with their reasoning and problem solving, this resource follows a similar progression to Fluent in Five and provides Year 6 teachers with 3-5 SATs reasoning questions for every day of the school term. And you can download 6 weeks of it here, giving you almost 360 maths rapid reasoning questions.

6. Recommended SATs Revision Programme of Lessons 

Here is a selection of essential analysis to help you inform your approach to SATs revision.

We’ve conducted this analysis first and foremost to ensure our one to one SATs revision programme is as effective as possible. Third Space Learning’s online tuition programme is tailored specifically to the needs of the individual student to help them to strengthen their skills and fill the gaps in their learning.

In building our programme we conducted some analysis of SATs topics and release the results for free to all schools to help them inform their own SATs revision plans. It involves an in-depth look at previous KS2 maths SATs papers, QLA data our own internal programme data to understand which topics come up most, which are likely to be worth the most marks, and which are found the hardest to grasp by pupils. The results provide you with your best fit year 6 maths revision programme of lessons – from when to teach multiplication and division to what you should include in each of your SATs revision lessons.

7. KS2 Knowledge Organiser – Year 6 Maths

While knowledge organisers are often left to your ‘topic’ lessons in Geography and History, we believe that in the run up to SATs it really helps to focus Year 6, so this KS2 Maths Knowledge Organiser summarises the essential terms and techniques your pupils will need to know for SATs. Download it and use it as it is or as a starting point for your own knowledge organiser. And thanks to @_MissieBee for sharing this with us.

8. Third Space Learning’s Maths Hub of resources

Part of Third Space offer to schools is to give them the resources that lie at the heart of our pedagogy and successful SATs preparation. By registering free on our Math Hub you’ll have access to lots more of our SATs revision resources, including CPD videos, model answers for every SATs reasoning question since 2016, SATs revision lessons to use in your intervention groups and many more besides. Many of these are available free, with more unlocked to those schools purchasing premium access. All the SATs resources can be found in the Third Space Maths Hub and anyone can register for free.

Best other FREE Year 6 SATs revision resources

9. Previous SATs Papers from 2016-2022

Past papers on the new curriculum are all available from the government practice materials site. You’ll be sure to need this at some point. You can also share it with parents so they can access and support children with SATS test style questions at home if that’s part of your home learning strategy.

It is also possible to get hold of pre-2016 KS2 SATs papers from all sorts of suppliers but be wary of using them for any complete assessments, even if the individual questions available are still valid. 

10. NCETM bank of free Maths SATs resources 

National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics have produced some excellent primary assessment resources which can be used as formative or summative tasks with Year 6. From my own experience of these, I would advise you edit each of the questions slightly and develop your own bank of KS2 SATs assessment questions for Maths. Helpfully, you can build whole lessons around  one question or one question style or even a complete SATs Paper.

11. Diagnostic Questions for KS2 SATs preparation

Diagnostic Questions is a great resource of diagnostic quizzes for end of KS1 and KS2. Sign up is necessary but worth it. You can use the resources as starting activities, then reverse engineer them by working with the whole class to think of the steps and skills needed to answer it in reverse. This is great SATs preparation.

The White Rose Maths Hub in conjunction with Diagnostic Questions has also produced daily Maths quizzes to support KS1 and KS2 SATs revision, with questions split into areas aligned with the curriculum that in the style of KS2 National Tests. 

12. White Rose Maths Hub SATs style reasoning resources

You can’t really escape White Rose Maths resources if you’re a UK primary school teacher! And although they’re increasingly offering paid for support, you can still get hold of lots of their high quality free stuff as well.

With reasoning looming so large in the national assessments, it’s definitely worth downloading their reasoning booklets linked to each area of the maths curriculum as well as any other SATs practice packs they put out. Perfect for reverse engineering required skills from questions.

13. The Primary Maths Challenge (PMC) – ideal for KS2 SATs Revision

This is a fun and exciting mathematical challenge run by the Mathematical Association and aimed at pupils in years 5 and 6. It has lots of activities and free KS2 SATs test papers.

14. Emaths – your best alternative source of practice papers

Emaths Mark McCourt has been sharing free Maths pedagogy and KS2 Maths revision resources on his Emaths blog since 2004. He’s created a range of new national curriculum style past papers and resources for both KS1 and KS2. Also – the cherry on the top – resources are often donated to the site by other teachers. For more excellent Maths guidance from Mark McCourt find out what the 10 mastery maths approach highlights from his book Teaching For Mastery are. 

15. TES downloadable free SATs paper template – Arithmetic

A teacher’s best friend, TES offers a downloadable Maths SATs Arithmetic template in the style and format of the KS2 SATs Year 6 arithmetic test which, once downloaded, can be edited regularly with different arithmetic questions. You can even edit it so that every question focuses on a particular element of arithmetic such as adding fractions to enable the KS2 Maths revision to help the children gain speed, fluency and confidence.

16. Ultimate KS2 Maths Organiser

The Ultimate KS2 Maths organiser is not strictly free but it’s so useful and so inexpensive we thought it worth including within your KS2 SATs revision. Like SATs in Minutes from Third Space it gives video answers to every question from previous KS2 SATs papers; each question is clickable and directs the user to a YouTube video to explain how to solve the problem. They are broken into key areas of the curriculum and contain every question asked on that KS2 Maths concept from past SATs papers. 

17. My Mini Maths

Many schools now do Third Space Learning’s Fluent in Five at the start or end of every maths session. For an alternative to this you can try My Mini Maths which also includes 10-minute tests.

18. Maths Frame

An oldie but a goody, Maths Frame have all of the KS2 maths objectives as strands. Helpfully, clicking into an area of maths allows teachers to open interactives or generate a short SATs style assessment linked that that particular strand of maths and focus in on – for example – the year 6 programme of study.

19. SATs one page mark schemes 

Sophie Bartlett, in a favour to Year 6 teachers everywhere, has taken all the answers from the 2016 Sample paper up to the 2019 SATs Paper and put them onto a single sheet of paper for each year. So simple and yet so helpful when you’re marking them not to be flicking from one page to the next.

20. SATs Paper with mistakes

Finishing with a real treat from @_mrmorgs, this is the totally new completed arithmetic paper with errors. You can use it as part of a Year 6 SATs revision session in Maths; children work their way through the paper, finding the errors and then discuss the misconceptions that the error shows or where the error shows a lack of fluency in their maths. It comes with a children’s copy, a teacher’s copy and guidance on which answers are correct, incorrect, fluent, not fluent etc. Great for class discussion!

This paper comes from Mr Morgs blog where he shares several other SATs revision resources you may find useful.

21. Worked examples

Year 6 Worked Examples Pack 1 – This resource encourages pupils to become the teacher. They are presented with a set of questions that have been answered, but not always correctly. Pupils are encouraged to check the work and discuss the errors made to help develop their mathematical reasoning skills as well as providing a safe space to analyse/ address common errors.

That’s the end of our list of free SATs revision resources. 

But of course there’s more to life than SATs in Year 6. While revision resources like this can be useful for any teacher, effective teaching must always come first for learning and progress in mathematics.

Making young children question, wonder, doubt, hypothesise, reason and play – that’s our primary goal, and Year 6 is no exception.

What are your favourite KS2 SATs revision resources? 

These are our go to KS2 SATs revision resources and practice papers to help prepare Year 6 for the SATs results they deserve. What KS2 Maths revision resources are missing? Tweet @thirdspacetweet with your own recommendations and we’ll add them in here.

More free resources and Year 6 SATs revision

• 35 SATs maths questions
• Bar Modelling Your Way To Year 6 Multi-Step Word Problems in SATs
• 8 Strategies For Answering SATs Questions

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