Free Year 6 SATs Revision: The Full Plan

What SATs actually cover

Key Stage 2 SATs are taken in school over a set week in May (the exact dates are published on gov.uk each year). The papers are:

• English reading — one paper: read a booklet of texts, answer questions on them. Tests understanding, inference and vocabulary rather than anything to memorise.
• English grammar, punctuation and spelling (often called GPS or SPaG) — a questions paper on grammar and punctuation, plus a short spelling test read aloud by the teacher.
• Maths — three papers: one arithmetic (pure calculation) and two reasoning (worded and multi-step problems).
• Writing is assessed by the teacher across the year's work, not by a test — so "SATs revision" for writing mostly means keeping up whatever the school asks. Science is not tested annually; a sample of schools takes science tests in some years.

Two useful implications. Arithmetic is the most learnable paper — steady practice moves it quickly, which is why it anchors the weekly rhythm below. And reading comprehension improves more from regular reading and talking about books than from practice papers, so daily reading counts as revision even though it doesn't look like it.

One reassurance to hand to your child early: SATs have no pass or fail for them, no resits, and no effect on GCSEs or anything later — they mainly tell the secondary school where support may help, and measure the school more than the child. A child who has genuinely absorbed that revises better. (More on this in our guide for children struggling with Year 6 maths.)

The realistic rhythm: little, often, from January

The plan that works is unheroic: short sessions most days from the start of the spring term, so everything is covered once without any week being awful. As a shape:

• Daily, about 10 minutes: arithmetic practice. The single highest-return habit — quick, measurable, and it feeds confidence for everything else.
• Three or four times a week, 15–20 minutes: one maths topic from the shaky list (how to build that list is next). One topic per session, not three.
• Alternate days, 10–15 minutes: reading together with a couple of genuine questions about the text, alternating with a short burst of GPS practice — grammar terms and punctuation rules are quick wins once named.
• Weekly, once revision is established: a small taste of past-paper questions so the format holds no surprises — building to one or two full papers at test pace in the final few weeks, not before. All past papers are free on gov.uk.
• Always: a proper weekend day off, and normal bedtimes. In the last week before SATs, wind down rather than up — rest reliably beats cramming.

That is roughly 45 minutes to an hour spread over a typical day-and-a-bit of the week — enough, on top of what school is doing, for almost any child. If your child is anxious or already schooled hard all day, do less; the plan flexes down before it flexes up.

Build the topic list, then hit it with free resources

Revision fails when it re-covers what a child already knows. So start by printing the Year 6 Maths checklist and the Year 6 English checklist, and mark each topic honestly: secure, shaky, or missing. Your child can help — Year 6 children are usually accurate about what scares them. The shaky-and-missing topics are the revision list; everything else is maintenance.

Then work the list through our Year 6 Maths and Year 6 English pages, where topics carry resources we have opened and checked for relevance and year-group fit, in several formats with access labels shown clearly. Choose the format to match the problem: a video when the concept never landed (rewindable, patient, and it quietly teaches you the current school method); practice questions when the concept is there but unreliable; worksheets for arithmetic fluency. If a topic keeps collapsing, the real gap is usually a year or two earlier — drop to the Year 5 or Year 4 version of the same topic without ceremony and rebuild from there.

Common high-value maths topics to check first, because so much else leans on them: fractions (including the four operations on them), place value with decimals, percentages, and the ratio family. In English: inference questions, and the grammar terminology the GPS paper names directly.

Print the countdown planner

To hold the rhythm without a spreadsheet, print our SATs countdown planner — a week-by-week grid for the spring term with space to write your own dates (SATs week moves each year, so you fill in the dates from gov.uk), a main focus for each week, and a line for one thing that went well. Work backwards from SATs week: give the final week to rest and light review, the few weeks before that to past-paper familiarity, and everything earlier to the shaky-topic list, hardest topics first while there is most time.

The "one thing that went well" column is not decoration. Filled in weekly, it becomes the evidence — for your child and for you at 11pm — that the plan is working, which is what keeps a family calm in April.