2024 SATs Success Stories From Primary Schools Across The UK

What do SATs success stories across the UK look like in 2024? While, the 2024 Year 6 cohort didn’t have strikes or coronations to contend with, 51% of teachers thought the 2024 SATs experience was harder than 2023.

So we wanted to dig into how this year’s SATs cohort continued to be affected by the pandemic, how their experience compares to previous years, and how schools helped their pupils achieve SATs success despite the disruption of the last few years.

As the UK’s largest provider of one to one maths tuition for primary schools, we work with thousands of schools in the lead-up to SATs. We saw firsthand just how tough it was at times for Year 6 teachers, pupils and senior leaders in 2023/24.

But — rather than listening to our own experience — if you’re anything like the teachers and school leaders we talk to every day, you’re most interested in the reflections of other schools like yours.

We’ve gathered feedback and thoughts from the 4,000+ schools we’ve worked with through maths tutoring, surveys, in-depth phone calls and school visits to bring you the SATs success stories of 2024 and help you build your success story for 2025.

This article showcases the incredible dedication of teachers and senior leaders supporting their Year 6 pupils and the different ways these schools have managed to achieve SATs success in 2024.

A safe space to make mistakes helps pupils grow in confidence

Often, there are pupils in the classroom who don’t have the resilience or confidence to keep tackling tough maths problems. They might be unable to answer specific question types, resort to guessing the answer, or give up easily when answers aren’t immediately obvious.

Our 2024 SATs teacher survey clearly showed many teachers felt their pupils lacked confidence in maths. Particularly due to a lack in mathematical foundations and the increasingly difficult wording of the reasoning papers.

Additional tuition from Third Space Learning tutors gave pupils regular exposure to reasoning word problems and opportunities to talk through their maths in a low-stakes one to one environment.

This helped develop pupils’ verbal fluency, reasoning and problem-solving skills, and confidence.

Personalised support helps more pupils meet the expected standard

The mammoth task of plugging gaps in pupils’ knowledge and building confidence for test taking to ensure pupils met the expected standards in the 2024 SATs sometimes seemed impossible. And, every year it appears to get harder. In 2024, 72% of Year 6 teachers thought the maths papers were more difficult than in 2023.

But, we were absolutely blown away by the positive feedback from schools who’d used our SATs revision programme to help their target Year 6 pupils head into their exams feeling confident and prepared for the challenge.

Through ongoing diagnostic assessments, the Third Space Learning SATs revision programme identifies each pupil’s individual learning gaps and provides support where pupils need it most to succeed in maths SATs.

On average, Third Space Learners achieved higher scores in their maths papers than the rest of their year group, and than the national average.

Whilst the SATs programme is effective in raising attainment, we know that it isn’t just about scores. Most importantly, pupils walk away having a greater understanding of maths concepts and are better prepared for the next stage of their maths journey.

Regular opportunities to practise helps prepare pupils

Every year, teachers tell us there’s not enough time to cover the Year 6 curriculum and revise topics from Years 3-5.

Without opportunities to practise their skills and apply their knowledge to different contexts, pupils can feel stumped when they face maths papers and aren’t quite sure what’s expected of them.

We often hear from our schools how the additional one to one sessions give pupils extra opportunities to consolidate their learning and apply their knowledge to SATs-style questions.

With the help of their tutors, pupils can confidently explore the different math strategies and vocabulary required to answer reasoning questions.

More support means more pupils can achieve Greater Depth

Clearly, all teachers would love for lots of their pupils to reach Greater Depth, but with such a challenging few years for the 2024 Year 6 cohort and their teachers, this often felt like an unachievable goal. Many pupils were lacking the basic building blocks to access the KS2 curriculum.

We were absolutely delighted to hear that so many of our Third Space Learners were able to achieve Age-Related Expectations and Greater Depth in 2024. Particularly as so many of these pupils were working at pre-Year 6 levels before they started the intervention.

Effective whole class teaching resources are essential for SATs success

We want as many pupils as possible to succeed. But not all pupils at our schools are signed up for the maths tuition. That’s why we create and share a huge selection of maths whole school resources — including a wide variety of SATs resources.

Fluent in Five, our year-long daily arithmetic scheme, has a particularly positive impact on pupils’ SATs successes. Fluent in Five helps:

• Familiarise pupils with the kinds of questions they’ll face in the arithmetic paper;
• Build pupils’ confidence to use mental maths strategies to questions;
• Boosts number fluency.

A few of our favourite pupil success stories

We love hearing from our schools about the overall impact of the tuition, but it really warms our hearts when we hear about individual pupils who’ve managed to beat the odds to succeed this year.

Here are a few of our favourite stories:

After a few years without SATs, it’s great to see how many pupils have risen to the challenge and we’re so incredibly proud of all our Third Space Learners.

After reflecting on the previous SATs results week, it’s great to see the same kinds of positive comments that we received in previous years:

Third Space Learning’s impact on pupils across the country

One to one interventions, such as ours, can have a real, noticeable impact on both confidence and attainment. Reasons for this include:

Each week, pupils draw, talk and type their way through their personalised lessons in our engaging interactive classroom, where their understanding is assessed. Tutors also help pupils explore the steps needed to answer different questions efficiently. 

What do pupils think?

Hear from students themselves how much they enjoy one to one tuition and how they’ve gained confidence in their maths and SATs ability over time. Here are a few of our favourite quotes from some of our Third Space pupils:

The importance of starting SATs prep early

Something that many teachers in our community agreed on in 2024 was the need to start thinking about SATs further in advance for the following academic year:

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