2026 KS2 SATs papers: free Super Pack

The 2026 papers felt fair to most teachers, but they asked children to explain more and recall less. The pass marks fell in every subject – reading most of all, from 28 to 25 out of 50 – which tells us the papers were harder to score on than in 2025. Here is what came up, and how to use the papers for mock tests.

2026 KS2 Reading: two stories, one report – and lots of inference

• The texts: Owl in Danger (an Animal Ark extract), Matilda’s Invention (from The Matilda Effect by Ellie Irving) and a non-fiction report on Amelia Earhart – about 1,960 words, with no poem. For the first time, both opening texts were fiction.
• Inference-heavy: about 42% of the questions asked children to infer, against about 36% retrieval. The first text alone carried 10 inference marks.
• Stamina: with about 3,000 words to read across both booklets and plenty of written answers, slower readers often ran out of time.
• Vocabulary: words such as “pioneering” and “unconventional” in the Amelia Earhart text caught some children out.
• The pass mark: 25 out of 50 for the expected standard (2025: 28), and 39 for the higher standard.

💡 Tips for the children

• Explain, then prove. For “why” and “how do you know” questions, give your idea and then a short piece of evidence from the text.
• Keep moving. If a question stops you, mark it and come back – the easier retrieval marks in text 3 are worth the same.
• Read the question twice. “Find and copy one word” means one word; “give two reasons” means two.

2026 KS2 Maths: friendly arithmetic, tough reasoning

• Arithmetic: nine in ten teachers in a Third Space Learning survey rated Paper 1 average or easier, and many children finished with time to spare.
• Reasoning: the reasoning papers were the talking point – about two thirds of teachers rated one of them difficult or very difficult, with multi-step questions worth just one mark and wordy contexts.
• Hardest topics: fractions, decimals and percentages (the area teachers cited most), then ratio and proportion, shape and measurement.
• The pass mark: 56 out of 110 for the expected standard (2025: 58), and 94 for the higher standard.

💡 Tips for the children

• Bank the arithmetic. Paper 1 is where the quickest marks are – check every answer, especially fractions and long division.
• Underline the steps. In a long word problem, underline each thing you need to find before you start calculating.
• Show your working. On two-mark questions a correct method can still earn a mark even if the answer slips.

2026 KS2 Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling: grammar in context

• Punctuation led: about 30% of Paper 1 tested punctuation – colons between clauses, brackets and dashes for parenthesis, and hyphens in compound words.
• Trickier twists: “after” used as a preposition, “right” as an adjective, the subjunctive (“if I were”), and several “which one is NOT…” questions.
• The spellings: words included differed, fascinating, rough, antique, suspicious, hazardous, knitting and flour – silent letters, “ough”, “-que” and homophones all appeared.
• The pass mark: 34 out of 70 for the expected standard (2025: 35), and 55 for the higher standard.

💡 Tips for the children

• Read the whole sentence. A word’s class depends on its job in the sentence, not on the word itself.
• Watch for NOT. Circle the word “not” in a question before you choose your answer.
• Sound it out, then check it looks right. In the spelling test, write the word, then look again for silent letters and endings such as “-ous” and “-tion”.

Sources: STA 2026 test materials and scaled score tables; Schools Week (2026 scaled scores); Sophie Bartlett’s 2026 reading and GPS analyses (Learning by Questions); Third Space Learning’s 2026 maths SATs teacher survey.