KS2 SATs Results Are Now Delayed Until 16 July: What It Means for Your Year 6 Child

Pearson has confirmed that Key Stage 2 SATs results will now reach primary schools on Thursday 16 July 2025 — nine days later than the original date of 7 July. If your child is in Year 6, that pushes the results into the final week of term for many schools, and it has caused understandable frustration for parents, teachers and heads.

Here is what has actually gone wrong, what the delay changes on a practical level, and what — if anything — you should raise with your child's school in the meantime.

What Pearson has said

Pearson is announcing a delay in the delivery of SATs results, which will now be delivered on 16 July. This delay is the result of technical issues with the new SATs platform Pearson uses to support markers, along with technical issues in the transfer of data within the systems Pearson uses for SATs. The company has stressed that the problem is confined to this year's SATs process and does not affect its GCSEs, A levels or vocational qualifications, which run on separate systems.

This is the first year Pearson has been responsible for delivering the KS2 SATs, after winning a contract from the Standards and Testing Agency (STA) that had previously been held by Capita. The contract, reported by Schools Week to be worth up to £180 million, was awarded following a difficult first year for Capita in 2022.

It isn't only the GPS marking backlog

Parents who have been following the story will already know about the earlier problems with marking the Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling (GPS) paper. Markers of Year 6 SATs were given more time to finish processing papers and a pay bonus, after facing weeks of technical glitches on a new Pearson-run system. Pearson called on maths markers to help get through the outstanding grammar, punctuation and spelling (GPS) papers.

But the GPS backlog is only part of the picture. The delay announcement points to two overlapping technical failures: the marker-facing platform itself, and the systems used to move data between them. On top of that, the delay follows a series of problems with this year's SATs, including difficulties on the first day of the tests, when schools struggled to access the National Curriculum Assessments (NCA) Portal, which headteachers warned could lead to mistakes in registering pupils as absent.

Ofqual, the exams regulator, has called the delay "deeply disappointing", and separately — in an unrelated case — issued a Chief Regulator's Rebuke to Pearson for serious breaches around its 2025 A Level maths assessments. Just over 75,000 students in England sat Pearson's A Level maths exams but failures in design and delivery of the assessments caused significant public concern. Those two stories arriving in the same week are why the Department for Education is now under pressure to act. The Department for Education has said it is 'exploring all options for recourse', which could include cancelling the contract.

What the new date means for your Year 6 child

For most children, honestly, not very much. SATs results do not determine which secondary school your child attends — that was settled by the National Offer Day allocation on 3 March 2025. They also do not decide setting arrangements at every secondary; many schools use their own baseline tests in September, and some use CAT (Cognitive Abilities Test) scores instead.

That said, a 16 July release does change a few practical things:

• Results will land very close to the end of term. Many primary schools break up in the week beginning 21 July. Teachers will have less time than usual to talk you through the numbers before your child leaves.
• The review deadline has moved. Schools were due to receive their results on Tuesday 7 July. However, results will now be available on Thursday 16 July. As a result, the deadline for schools to apply for reviews of marking or clerical errors will move back to Friday 24 July. If a result looks obviously wrong for your child, the school has a very tight window to submit a review — flag concerns quickly.
• End-of-year reports may look different. Some schools include SATs outcomes in the final written report. Yours may now issue the report without them, or send scores separately after the school year ends.
• Transition paperwork to secondary is unaffected in most cases. Schools generally share pupil transition information — attainment bands, SEND records, safeguarding notes, pastoral information — through their own transition process, not by waiting for the final scaled scores. Secondary schools are used to receiving SATs data centrally through the National Pupil Database in the autumn.

What to ask your child's school (if anything)

There is no need to chase the school for information they don't yet have. But a short, calm conversation with the class teacher or Year 6 lead before term ends is reasonable if you want to know:

• Whether the school plans to release results to parents on 16 July itself, or a day or two later once staff have checked them.
• How the school will communicate results if they land after your child has broken up — email, letter, or a login to the school portal.
• Whether the transition information going to the secondary school includes teacher assessment as well as test data, so the receiving school has a full picture even before scaled scores arrive.
• What the process will be if you want to query a mark, given the 24 July review deadline.

If your child is anxious about their results, the delay is worth mentioning gently rather than letting them stew. Nine extra days of waiting is unhelpful for a ten- or eleven-year-old who has been told these tests matter.

Keep the results in proportion

A scaled score — the number your child will eventually receive — is the raw mark converted onto a 80–120 scale, with 100 representing the expected standard. It is a snapshot of one week in May, not a verdict on your child. Secondary schools know this. They will meet your child in September, run their own assessments within the first half-term, and form their own view.

If your child struggled with a particular paper and you are considering additional support over the summer or into Year 7, the sensible time to make that decision is once you have the scaled scores in hand and, ideally, after a conversation with the Year 6 teacher about where the gaps actually are. Booking tutoring in a panic before you know what the numbers say tends to waste money on the wrong subject.

The short version

Results arrive on Thursday 16 July 2025. The cause is a mix of platform failures and data-transfer problems at Pearson, on top of the earlier GPS marking backlog. Ministers are considering their options with the contract. For your child, the practical impact is small: a compressed window for reviews, possibly a later school report, and a slightly less tidy end to primary school. Secondary transition will go ahead as planned.