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2025 KS2 SATs reading papers
Year 6 · with the official mark scheme
The reading SATs papers that Year 6 children in England sat on Tuesday 13 May 2025, at the end of Key Stage 2. One reading booklet and one answer booklet, sat together. 50 marks in all. That year, 28 marks reached the expected standard. They open on GOV.UK, with the mark scheme.
Why these open on GOV.UK
The reading booklets contain material we are not allowed to host, so these link to the official copy. Same file, one click further.
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2025 key stage 2 English reading booklet
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2025 key stage 2 English reading answer booklet
2025 reading at a glance
- Sat on Tuesday 13 May 2025
- Marks for the expected standard 28 out of 50 (a scaled score of 100)
- Marks for the higher standard 40 out of 50 (a scaled score of 110)
- Across England 75% of pupils reached the expected standard, and 34% the higher standard.
What your child's mark means
Add up the marks with the mark scheme, then find the total on this bar. These are the 2025 boundaries; other years are slightly different.
0 to 27 marks Working towards the expected standard
28 to 39 marks Expected standard (100 to 109)
40 to 50 marks Higher standard (110 to 120)
For the exact scaled score for every mark, see the 2025 conversion table. Fewer than 3 marks gets no scaled score.
How 2025 compares with other years
The marks needed for the expected standard change every year, because some papers turn out a little harder than others. For reading, it has ranged from 21 marks (2016) to 29 marks (2022).
In 2025, 28 marks were needed for the expected standard, 1 more than in 2024. That makes it one of the papers that needed more marks than usual, which suggests children found it a little easier. 75% of pupils reached the expected standard, compared with 74% in 2024.
Average, 26 marks. Columns start at 16 marks so the differences show. There were no tests in 2020 or 2021.
What was different in 2025
The usual Monday-to-Thursday timetable, with no changes to how the tests were run.
What this paper set is
One reading booklet and one answer booklet, sat together. 50 marks.
A raw mark on its own does not mean very much. It is converted to a scaled score between 80 and 120, where 100 is the expected standard, and the conversion changes every year because the papers differ slightly in difficulty. How KS2 SATs work explains the whole thing, including where to find that year's conversion table.
Dates and marks from the Standards and Testing Agency's 2025 conversion table and 2025 assessment arrangements. National figures from the Department for Education.
Contains material developed by the Standards and Testing Agency for 2025 national curriculum assessments and licensed under Open Government Licence v3.0.