The Top 20 Year 6 Maths Revision Topics To Help Your Pupils Meet Age-Related Expectations and Achieve 100 in SATs [2025 UPDATE]

Year 6 maths revision for KS2 SATs starts at different points of the year for different schools — as SLT, Maths Lead, or a Year 6 teacher, you’ll need to decide when this is best for your pupils. And as there’s never enough time for revision, you’ll want to ensure you’re using the lessons you have most effectively by prioritising the topics that accumulate the highest number of marks. 

Knowing where to start with SATs revision so all those pupils who can, achieve the golden 100 standardised score is no easy task. Each year, Third Space Learning’s maths experts face the same challenge — which maths topics do we prioritise for SATs? 

Every January, schools across the country sign thousands of pupils up for the Third Space Learning SATs Revision Programme. To make sure every single school sees maximum pupil progress in their one-to-one tutoring sessions, we prioritise the topics with the biggest impact on each pupil’s SATs scores. 

The result? Two SATs revision programmes, comprising the top 20 highest impact topics and the next 20 most impactful topics for pupils who complete the first 20. 

Sneak peek: your top 5 SATs revision lessons

Before we shed some light on the thinking, planning and analysis behind the recommended maths revision in Year 6, let’s give you what you came here for; the top 5 highest impact topics. 

These topics appeared most frequently across the papers between 2016-2019 and 2022-2024. They are worth the most marks and conceptually make the most sense to prioritise. As such, these are the highest priority topics to cover in our one-to-one SATs revision programme:

1. Addition and Subtraction
2. Money
3. Multiplication and Division
4. Multiples, Factors and Prime Numbers
5. Place Value

Looking for the full list of high-impact revision topics? Keep reading to discover the rest of the top priority topics worth including in your SATs preparation. 

---

How we created the 2025 list of the top 40 SATs revision lessons

As soon as the KS2 SATs maths papers are released in May each year, our academic team analyse the following and add them to their SATs paper database dating back to 2016. 

• Question types;
• Content domains; 
• Marks available from each paper.

And pair this with: 

• Data from 7 years of SATs papers;
• Answers from 100,000 pupils following 30+ SATs lessons;
• Feedback from teachers, pupils and tutors.

Combined with their 40  years of experience in how children learn maths, the academic team created a hit list of the top 40 topics that “matter most” for the Year 6 maths revision in 2025. 

The best part? They’re already in priority order to give you and your pupils the best chance of achieving a standardised score of 100 or more in SATs 2025.

We’ve made our SATs revision programme analysis freely available to help you inform your SATs 2025 revision too.

7 years of SATs data, 2,100,000 maths lessons and 101 practice SATs questions

You may be thinking, I know what my school’s previous Year 6 pupils found difficult. But your cohort is likely 30, 60, or maybe 90 pupils at most. 

Thanks to 11 years of providing one-to-one SATs revision, we’ve recorded and analysed over 2,100,000 maths lessons from over 170,000 pupils.

This means we can overlay the 2016-2024 SATs analysis with our internal data and look in-depth at how pupils work through our SATs lessons. In particular, how they answer the SATs questions on frequently occurring topics.

Once we’ve identified the ‘top topics’ we can create a recommended order for your Year 6 maths SATs revision programme. 

Data analysis results

After completing the multi-layered data analysis, there was a clear list of the content domains that cropped up most frequently and accumulated the highest number of marks.  

Here are the topic strands that awarded the most marks for KS2 maths SATs and are highly important to cover during revision.

You can see the full data analysis at the end of this guide.

GET THE ANALYSIS ON PREVIOUS SATS

SATs have been running in their current incarnation for 7 years; there were no government standardised assessments in 2020 and 2021 as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Get all the analysis and results from previous national assessments below.
And find out which are the top 20 year 6 maths revision topics to focus on this year.

– SATs papers 2024
– SATs results 2024
– SATs papers 2023
– SATs results 2023
– SATs papers 2022
– SATs results 2022
– SATs papers 2019
– SATs results 2019
– SATs papers 2018
– SATs results 2018
– SATs papers 2017
– SATs results 2017
– SATs results 2016

40 lessons derived from the strands

Following our analysis of SATs questions by year group and strand, we grouped the most frequently occurring strands into 40 sensible topic-based lessons. These are split into two Year 6 SATs programmes of 20 questions each: 

• SATs Booster 
• SATs Follow-on 

SATs Booster contains the top 20 priority lessons for SATs revision. Covering these topics will have the highest impact on your pupils’ SATs preparation. 

The second programme, SATs Follow-on, covers the next 20 lessons likely to improve pupil preparedness for their maths SATs papers. 

Those who work through these lessons at a quicker pace can move on to the next 20 high impact topics in the SATs Follow-on programme. 

The top 20 lessons to maximise KS2 maths SATs revision for your pupils

Everyone’s SATs revision timetables will look different. Here at Third Space Learning, pupils enrolled on our SATs revision programme, available during the spring term, partake in a weekly session spanning approximately 15 weeks. 

Every lesson counts. And it’s one of the reasons we can achieve an average of double expected progress over a 14-15 week period.

Our new SATs Booster revision programme covers the top 20 high impact lessons. This means if pupils can work through one lesson a week, they’ll cover the most important topics to help improve their preparedness for the maths SATs.  

For those who work through these lessons at a quicker pace, there are 5 more lessons in the SATs Booster programme and 20 more in the SATs Follow-on programme. 

This recommended order takes into account not only the most ‘important’ lessons but also considers a coherent order for addressing individual concepts.

Top 20 high impact lessons 

Here are the top 20 high impact fluency and reasoning lessons that make up our SATs Booster programme. 

Using these topics for your revision lessons will give your pupils the additional support and knowledge they need before their SATs. 

Next 20 high impact lessons 

These are the next 20 high impact fluency and reasoning lessons that make up our SATs Follow-on programme. 

Use these topics as the basis of your revision lessons for pupils already secure with the SATs Booster lessons. 

Considerations

If your revision starts earlier or later than January, or the frequency of your revision lessons differs from ours, you’ll need to adapt these recommendations accordingly for your cohort.  

Some lower-scoring lessons are higher up the priority list than you may expect, such as ‘Reasoning with Time’, but it is conceptually important to have it there. Considering content coverage, topics and marks independently would not provide a sufficient picture, they must all be considered to create a truly comprehensive KS2 revision programme. 

How to structure your SATs revision lessons to help pupils gain more marks

Now you know which topics to target, and what order to teach them in. But how do you go about tackling these in revision lessons?

While prepping for the maths reasoning papers can feel like a bit of a mystery and is often where pupils struggle, Third Space Learning’s maths experts have included more fluency into their SATs strategy for 2025 and here’s why you should too.

Balancing arithmetic and reasoning

Despite our SATs revision programme focusing largely on reasoning, fluency is undeniably crucial to succeeding in maths. 

Pupils have a greater chance of reaching age-related expectations if they can pick up as many marks as possible in the arithmetic paper, which is worth the most marks of all three papers. 

Additionally, once pupils are secure with arithmetic and fluency, cognitive overload is reduced when faced with reasoning questions on the same topics. Pupils can focus on decoding the question rather than thinking about the mathematical skills needed. 

That’s why we’ve added more fluency lessons to our top 40 lessons this year and made sure every reasoning session starts with a fluency question.

Structuring your SATs revision lessons 

This year, we’ve added more fluency lessons to our SATs revision programme. Here’s how you can too.

1. Build in discrete fluency lessons

Focus on fluency to ensure pupils are confident with the maths skills and concepts they’ll need to pick up as many marks as possible in the arithmetic paper.   

2. Start reasoning lessons with fluency questions

Starting with a fluency question encourages pupils to practise the arithmetic skills required for Paper 1 by identifying and using efficient mental strategies to solve equations. 

This focuses on building and boosting your pupils’ confidence and stamina in maths.

3. Revisit reasoning

Follow fluency starters with at least three sets of different reasoning questions. This helps pupils practise reasoning while developing the habit of showing all of their working out and methodology.

4. Use formative and summative assessment

Include formative and summative assessment opportunities throughout each revision lesson as some topics and concepts may need repetition. 

Whether it’s questioning, independent tasks, or exit tickets, it’s key to both formative and summative assessment regularly in revision lessons to help you adapt your teaching strategies for maximum impact.

Ongoing assessment identifies pupils’ individual learning gaps and helps tutors adapt their teaching strategies throughout one-to-one SATs programmes to help maximise pupil progress. 

Additionally, low-stakes post-session questions assess pupils’ knowledge after each lesson and help inform tutors and schools of pupil progress for each individual. For our 2025 programme, we revisited our 232 post-session questions to ensure they align with all 40 lesson objectives in the SATs Booster and SATs Follow-on programmes. 

What else should you consider when creating your KS2 revision programme?

The addition of discrete fluency lessons provided an opportunity to add ‘Challenge’ questions for pupils ready to move on to the reasoning lessons for these topics. Each challenge question requires pupils to show their workings for a 2-mark question.

These questions are more cognitively demanding than the one-mark questions.

Further analysis of the SATs papers and results of our SATs 2024 teacher survey noted a marked increase in the difficulty of how questions are worded and the number of steps pupils need to complete to gain a mark. 

As a result, our maths experts have reviewed the wording of questions in our SATs lesson. The questions aim to prepare pupils for the papers’ trickier wording and more complex reasoning. 

Lessons still cover the core skills pupils need to practise, but also address the increasing complexity of the questions. 

Covering the core skills with additional exposure to complicated word problems and multistep problems releases cognitive load when faced with these question types in the SATs papers. 

Even after reading our data analysis and revision programme suggestions, you must consider your current Year 6 cohort when completing your SATs revision programme. Every cohort is slightly different, any suggestions should be adapted to meet their needs. 

Question level analysis of the SATs papers 2016-2024

Since 2016, we’ve analysed SATs past papers to see which reasoning topics came up most frequently, which are worth the most marks and which of our lessons pupils found the most challenging.

What did we take into consideration?

• KS2 SATs questions by year group;
• KS2 SATs questions by topics;
• KS2 SATS questions by marks per Third Space Learning lesson.

And what did we find?

KS2 SATs questions by year group

Year 1 and Year 2 content has not appeared in the Year 6 SATs papers since before 2016 and quite rightly so. These papers are to test knowledge from KS2. 

In 2019, the majority of questions focused on Year 6 content. The percentage dropped considerably in 2022 and remained lower in 2023. However, in 2024, there was a significant increase in questions covering Year 6 content. 

Across the three papers, almost 50%  of questions covered Year 6 content.  Coverage of Year 6 content across all three papers was the highest it’s ever been over the past seven years.

KS2 SATs questions by content domain

Here’s how the questions break down by year group and content domain.

What can we learn from this content domain coverage table?

Looking at the content domain coverage table provided by the DfE is relatively complex and hard to digest. 

So we’ve broken the information down to demonstrate the percentage of questions by strand (overarching groups for the smaller content domains) for the 2016-2024 reasoning papers more clearly.  

This also provides a better insight into how we have created our own KS2 maths revision lessons based on the strands.

KS2 SATS questions by marks per Third Space Learning revision lesson

After looking at questions by year group, and questions by content domain, we looked through every maths paper over the past 7 years and investigated how many marks were attributed to each of our own SATs revision lessons so we could see exactly where our SATs programme needed updating.

It’s clear that the four operations, decimal calculations and fractions, and decimals and percentages are awarded the highest number of marks year after year. 

Topics such as 3D shapes, volume and area, and perimeter are awarded fewer marks, influencing their position in the priority order of revision topics. 

Note: for this blog, where there are multiple year groups and content domains awarded to a question, we have analysed the data based on the first year group or content domain attributed to the mark.

Final word on KS2 SATs preparation

When starting the KS2 SATs revision programme, our goal was to end up with the highest quality lessons in the most effective order of SATs revision topics for a coherent topic order and breadth of coverage. 

After reading the maths reasoning paper analysis and the ultimate list of high-impact topics, it’s worth considering whether any topics are missing in your current revision plan — if you already have one. If not, now would be a great time to make a note of the lessons that will be most beneficial to your cohort during revision time. 

Careful analysis of past maths SATs papers and our KS2 SATs revision programme meant we overhauled the programme and split it into two new programmes to target the highest impact topics starting with topics with the most content coverage and marks available. 

This means that pupils will now have more exposure to important topics with many marks allocated to them.

Again, if you already have a KS2 revision programme, it’s essential to check whether any of the existing lessons need updating or changing entirely. 

For every pedagogical change we make, we train our tutors on the new concepts, strategies and support slides. If you’re lucky enough to have a TA for your class, it’s worth factoring in time to ensure they are up-to-date on the latest concepts, strategies and slides you’re using throughout your Year 6 SATs revision planning and lessons too. 

Interested in extra SATs revision support for your target pupils without adding to staff workload? Request a quote!