The dominance of SATs, and with it the SATs Reading Paper content domains, has created an illusion of progress while leaving children without the deep, transferable reading tools they actually need. It’s time to face the potential truth in many of our schools: teaching comprehension as a series of study skills linked to test question types does not follow the research in how to best teach reading. It may perhaps give us a narrow snap-shot assessment of their understanding, but has it really been improving comprehension?
The SATs Content Domains
Since the introduction of SATs, many schools have structured their entire reading curriculum around them. Teachers begin to drill children in techniques such as “retrieval,” “inference,” and “prediction” as if these are standalone skills that can be mastered in isolation and transferred from one text to another to improve overall comprehension abilities. In Year 2, after phonics instruction, classes are often moved straight into the process of answering practice test questions, with children explicitly taught acronyms to help them approach comprehension and support exam technique. These then end up in school progression documents giving the illusion that this correlates directly with a progression in comprehension. Schools have to be accountable, and children will face a lifetime of tests, so why not? Well, this isn’t how comprehension works.
What the Research Actually Says
The science of reading has consistently demonstrated that comprehension is not a skill that can be developed by practising test question types. Instead, comprehension is a product of a variety essential elements:
Background Knowledge – A reader’s understanding of a text is directly linked to their prior knowledge. The more a child knows about a topic, the better they will comprehend related texts. Building knowledge through a broad and rich curriculum is key.
Language and Vocabulary Development – Strong comprehension relies on a deep vocabulary. Explicit vocabulary instruction and exposure to sophisticated language structures through read-alouds and discussion are critical.
Comprehension Strategies – While comprehension strategies like summarising, predicting,, visualising and comprehension monitoring are helpful, they should be taught and embedded within a wide range of meaningful reading experiences.
Fluency – If a child struggles to decode words, they will struggle with comprehension. Schools must prioritise phonics and fluency instruction to ensure children can read texts effortlessly and focus on meaning.
Engagement and Discussion – Reading should be an active, thoughtful process. High-quality discussions, where children explore and debate texts with teachers who model expert reading, are the most effective way to develop true comprehension.
When schools prioritise teaching comprehension as a set of study skills, children may improve at answering test questions—but only those specific to the SATs. Their ability to read widely, think critically, and engage with a range of texts does not improve. Worse still, time spent drilling exam techniques comes at the expense of building real reading proficiency. This is why so many students who “pass” the SATs reading test at age 11 go on to struggle with reading at secondary school. They were taught how to succeed in a test, not how to comprehend and engage with complex texts independently.
There is a really useful podcast by Timothy Shanahan on this called I Want My Students to Comprehend, Am I Teaching the Wrong Kind of Strategies? The core idea behind comprehension strategies is that readers must actively engage with the ideas in a text to truly understand it. Since understanding requires making decisions about how to approach a text, strategies are closely linked to metacognition—thinking about one's own thinking. Rather than simply providing answers to specific types of questions, comprehension strategies guide readers in taking actions that help them process, retain, and make sense of the information they read.
In the blog post '5 Key Ideas from Primary Reading Simplified', Christopher Such discusses how school accountability have led to ineffective, stultifying teaching of reading.
What should we be focusing on?
Limit Comprehension Lessons Built Around Question Types – Stop treating retrieval, inference, and vocabulary as skills that need to be explicitly practised with SATs-style questions. These are simply labels for the types of understanding that emerge when reading is taught effectively. There's noting wrong with children having the chance to write about texts they have read, sometimes at length, but be aware of the difference between improving comprehension and assessing comprehension.
Prioritise a Knowledge-Driven Curriculum – Comprehension improves when children have broad knowledge. Schools must integrate reading with subjects like history, science, and geography to build deep understanding.
Teach Vocabulary Systematically – Explicitly teach new words in context and through rich discussion. Children must be exposed to (and use in a variety of contexts) sophisticated language daily to build a robust vocabulary.
Develop Fluency – Ensure children can decode effortlessly. A focus on phonics, repeated reading, and prosody (reading with expression) will support comprehension.
Engage in Deep Discussion of Texts – Move away from comprehension worksheets and instead immerse children in meaningful conversations about high-quality books. Let them debate, justify their ideas, and explore meaning in a way that reflects real reading.
Keep SATs Training Separate from Reading Instruction – Schools should prepare students for the format of the SATs, but this should be done through short, focused test preparation sessions, not as the foundation of reading lessons. True comprehension instruction should not be compromised by test-driven approaches.
If schools truly want to improve reading outcomes, they need to abandon the shallow, test-focused approach that has dominated primary classrooms for the last decade, both in Year 6 and preceding year groups. The evidence is clear: comprehension is built on knowledge, vocabulary, fluency, and discussion—not on proficiency in answering certain question types. The longer we allow SATs content domains to dictate reading instruction, the longer it will take to get our children where they need to be.
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