Our expert academic team have made a few key updates and improvements to the programme for 2025:

In previous years, our SATs Booster Programme has focused on reasoning. Each lesson would begin with a fluency starter, but then pupils would work through SATs-style reasoning questions with their tutors. This is because we know it's here that pupils often need most support.

However, as part of their yearly review of previous SATs papers and our own internal programme data, our academic team found that some topics need their own dedicated fluency lesson.

As such, there are now 4 fluency lessons in the SATs Booster Programme:

And 3 in the SATs Booster Follow-on Programme:

Fluency lessons still follow the same 'I do, we do, you do' format, but focus on core arithmetic skills required rather than the kinds of word problems pupils will face in the reasoning paper.

All reasoning lessons still begin with a fluency starter to help reduce cognitive overload when moving on to the reasoning questions.

If your pupils have benefited from the SATs Booster Programme before, you'll know that lesson slides display exam strategy prompts to help pupils successfully answer reasoning questions. This will be things like "Remember units" or "Look out for marks".

The new fluency slides include maths strategy prompts to help pupils use the quickest and most efficient method to solve arithmetic questions.

Every year, we send out a survey to our schools during SATs week. Every year, teachers tell us it's often the wordiness of the questions that trips pupils up.

Extra fluency lessons go a long way to ensure pupils are secure in the mathematical concepts and skills they need to tackle these trickier word questions, but we wanted to go further.

Our academic team have also revisited the reasoning questions and revised the wording on some to reflect the wording in the SATs papers. While we don't want to make every single question so tricky pupils struggle through the programme, we do want to make sure pupils have at least some exposure to the complex wording used in some questions.

As well as commenting on the wordier reasoning questions, teachers also feed back to us in our survey that the trickier 2-mark questions at the end of the arithmetic paper are often challenging to pupils.

To help prepare pupils as best possible, we've added a 'Challenge' question to the end of each fluency lesson to build confidence and familiarity with these kinds of questions.

​