SATs and the other UK primary assessments, explained

Parents at British schools in the UAE hear about SATs long before anyone explains what they are. This guide sets out which primary assessments exist in England, what each one actually tests, when they happen in 2026, and how to read the results. It also covers the part that matters most here: how much of this applies to a school in Dubai or Abu Dhabi.

Which assessments exist, and which are compulsory

In England, the Standards and Testing Agency runs a small set of assessments through primary school. Only three of them are statutory for state-funded schools.

The change at key stage 1 is the one that catches people out. The Department for Education announced in July 2022 that end of key stage 1 assessment would become non-statutory from the 2023 to 2024 academic year. The Year 2 reading, maths and grammar tests still exist, and schools can still use them, but they are now optional and so is the teacher assessment that went with them. The Year 1 phonics screening check was not part of that change and remains statutory.

The 2027 dates

These are the windows published by the Department for Education for the 2026 to 2027 academic year. The 2026 assessments ran in May and June 2026, so the dates below are the next ones a parent can plan around. Arrangements are unchanged while the wider Curriculum and Assessment Review is considered.

What each one actually tests

Year 1 phonics screening check

A short one-to-one check with a teacher in which the child reads a list of words aloud. Some are real words and some are invented, which is the point: an invented word cannot be recognised from memory, so it shows whether the child can decode using phonics rather than recall.

Year 4 multiplication tables check

An on-screen check of times tables up to 12 x 12, taken in class. Under standard administration it takes each pupil less than five minutes. There is no expected standard published for this check, so a score is a piece of information about fluency and not a pass or a fail.

Year 6 key stage 2 tests, the SATs

Externally marked papers in English reading, English grammar, punctuation and spelling, and maths, sat over four days in the same week nationally. Writing is not tested by a paper; it is assessed by the child’s teacher against a national framework.

How to read a SATs result

Key stage 2 results are reported as scaled scores rather than raw marks, so that results are comparable from year to year even when one year’s paper is slightly harder than another’s. The scale runs from 80 to 120. A scaled score of 100 or above means the child has met the expected standard in that test.

How much of this applies in the UAE

This is where UAE parents need a different answer from UK parents. All of the above is statutory for state-funded schools in England. A British school in Dubai or Abu Dhabi is a private school overseas, so it is not required to run any of these assessments. Many choose to, because it gives them a national benchmark and reassures parents who plan to move back, and some run only parts of it. Others use commercial baseline tests such as GL or CAT4 instead.

There is no reliable way to guess which applies to your school, so ask it directly. Three questions are usually enough: which UK national assessments do you administer, in which year groups, and how do you report the results to parents. If your child may move to a school in England, ask what evidence the school can provide in place of a SATs result.

What actually helps a child prepare

These assessments test the ordinary content of the National Curriculum for that year group, so the useful preparation is steady coverage of the curriculum rather than test drills in the final term. The published curriculum is the syllabus: what a Year 4 child should be fluent in, or what a Year 6 child should have covered in maths, is a matter of public record and not a secret held by the school.

That is the idea behind Decifer Learning. Every topic is mapped to the National Curriculum year by year, so a child in Year 4 in Dubai practises the same objectives as a Year 4 child in London, and a parent can see which of those objectives are secure and which are not. Our guide to the British curriculum in the UAE covers the wider structure these assessments sit inside, and the year groups and ages table is useful if you are working out which year your child belongs in.