What Is Inside The Complete KS2 SATs Maths Course

A large share of the maths on a KS2 SATs paper is taught in Year 6, the same year the papers are sat. Ratio, algebra, the mean, pie charts and the order of operations all arrive in the last twelve months of primary school, and the tests come in May.

That is the reason The Complete KS2 SATs Maths Course is organised by school year rather than by topic. It starts with the Year 3 basics and climbs all the way up to the standard of the SATs papers, so by the time your child reaches Year 6 they have something solid to stand on.

I'm Aadam, an experienced maths teacher, and I wrote these lessons for the children I tutor. This post lays out everything the course contains: what each school year covers, what the three papers test, how a lesson runs, and how to work out where your child should begin.

What arrives after you buy it

You get an email with one link straight after you pay. The link opens your course page, where the 64 lessons sit under four headings, Year 3, Year 4, Year 5 and Year 6. Bookmark that page, because every lesson you own lives there.

Lessons open in a web browser, so there is no app to download and nothing to print. Work on a laptop or a desktop computer. Each lesson is built for a full size screen, and a phone is too small to work from. You keep the course for good, and any new lesson I write is added to the same page at no extra cost.

The four school years, one at a time

64 lessons, 379 units and 5,538 questions in total. Each lesson sits in the year the National Curriculum teaches it, and the lessons go right up to the level of the SATs papers by the end of Year 6.

Year 3. Reading and writing numbers to 100 and then to 1,000, mental and column addition and subtraction, a first look at fractions and adding them, angles and turns, naming 2D and 3D shapes, then tally charts, bar charts and pictograms. It is where written methods start, so it is worth getting the columns neat here rather than untangling them in Year 5.

Year 4. Numbers to 10,000 and rounding, grid and column multiplication, short division, decimal place value, multiplying and dividing by 10, 100 and 1,000, negative numbers, fractions of amounts, symmetry, perimeter, coordinates and transformations, converting units, time and timetables, and Roman numerals. Most of the written methods for multiplying and dividing are taught here.

Year 5. Numbers to a million, divisibility rules, squares, cubes and roots, estimating, adding and subtracting decimals, factors, multiples and primes, multiplying and dividing fractions, percentages of amounts, converting between fractions, decimals and percentages, the area of rectangles and triangles, and two-way tables. Percentages and primes appear for the first time, and both turn up on the reasoning papers.

Year 6. BIDMAS and inverse operations, multiplying and dividing decimals, HCF and LCM, reverse fractions, three ratio lessons, seven algebra lessons running from building expressions to sequences, angles in triangles and polygons, volume, the mean and problems with averages, pie charts, combinations, and multi-step word problems. This is the year the papers are sat, and these lessons go right up to the standard the SATs ask for.

Each year name above links to its own page, which lists every lesson for that year with a sample question you can try with your child. The KS2 maths by school year page shows all four side by side.

What the three SATs papers actually test

The KS2 maths SATs are three papers worth 110 marks, and no calculator is allowed on any of them.

Paper 1 is arithmetic. It is 40 marks in 30 minutes, and every question is a calculation to work out. There is no shape, measurement or statistics on it at all, so it rewards a child who can run the written methods quickly and accurately.

Papers 2 and 3 are reasoning. Each one is 35 marks in 40 minutes. These are the worded questions, where your child has to decide which piece of maths a problem needs before they can do it.

Across the whole test, between 75 and 85 per cent of the marks come from number, ratio and algebra. Shape, measures and statistics share what is left. That is why the number lessons in this course run the deepest, and why the arithmetic paper draws on every year of it, from column addition in Year 3 to BIDMAS in Year 6.

Results come back as a scaled score, where 100 is the expected standard. If you have a raw mark from a practice paper, the scaled score converter turns it into that number, and the KS2 maths SATs past papers page has the real papers to practise with.

How one lesson runs

Every lesson follows the same pattern, so once your child has done one they know how the rest work.

Each unit opens with a worked example. Your child clicks through it one line at a time, so they watch the method being set out step by step instead of looking at a finished answer and guessing how it got there.

Then come the practice questions, marked easy, medium and hard by colour. Your child writes the working on paper, then taps a question to reveal its answer and check. When you want to go through a whole page together, one button shows every answer at once.

Each lesson ends with a mixed challenge that pulls questions from all of its units. Your child has to work out which method each question needs, which is exactly the skill the reasoning papers test.

Many lessons also carry an interactive tool that your child moves and builds with, such as a place value slider, a bar model builder, a pie chart plotter or a shape builder. Seeing a rule happen on screen first makes the written method much easier to follow.

Two lessons that go beyond the SATs

Year 6 includes reading numbers up to a billion, although the SATs stop at ten million. It also includes solving simultaneous equations by elimination, which is normally taught in secondary school.

Both are there for the child who is already comfortable at the top of the SATs and ready for a stretch. A child who finds them hard loses nothing on the paper, so treat them as extras rather than as targets.

Where your child should start

Start with your child's school year. Open that year's page, try the sample questions together, and begin at the first lesson of the year.

If the first lesson of their year is a struggle, go back to the year before and start there. In my experience, gaps from earlier years are the usual reason a child finds Year 6 maths hard, and closing them first makes everything after it quicker.

If you are home educating, the home education maths page sets out all 64 lessons as a year by year ladder, and this page shows a full lesson, worked example and questions included, before you spend anything.

For a child in Year 5 or Year 6, the free Maths Level Finder is another quick way in. The questions get harder when your child is right and easier when they are wrong, and at the end you get a printable report and the lessons that would help.

What the course does not do

It does not mark your child's work or send you a report. Your child checks each answer by revealing it, so it is worth looking through their written working every week or so to see what is going wrong as well as what is right.

It is not a tutor. If your child is stuck in a way a worked example does not fix, they need a person to talk it through with them.

It covers maths only. The KS2 reading and grammar, punctuation and spelling tests are not part of it.

The SATs course or the 11+ course?

If your child is also sitting the 11+, buy The Complete 11+ Maths Course instead. It contains all 64 of these lessons plus 16 more that 11+ papers ask for and the SATs do not, including percentage change, reverse percentages, speed, distance and time, surface area, Venn and Carroll diagrams, probability and the puzzle lessons such as sudoku and number bases.

The 11+ course is £200 and this one is £160, so the extra lessons cost £40 between them. For a child sitting only the SATs, those extra lessons are not needed, and this course covers everything the papers can ask for.

What it costs

£160 for all 64 lessons, which works out at £2.50 a lesson. Bought one at a time as single lessons, the same 64 come to £379.37.

Every lesson is listed on the year pages before you buy, so you can check the course covers what your child needs first. If you have a question this post does not answer, email info@shlc-tutor.co.uk and I will reply.

What to do this week

Open the page for your child's school year and ask them the sample questions, one a night. Note the first one they cannot do without help. That is where their SATs preparation really starts.

Then try the free maths practice questions. They use the same click to reveal answers as the lessons, with no sign up, so you can see whether the format works for your child before buying anything.

When you are ready, The Complete KS2 SATs Maths Course is the whole of KS2 maths in one purchase, set out in the order your child will meet it at school.

Aadam, SHLC Tutors