NFER Tests FAQs

View more NFER Tests FAQs on our resources site.

KS1 reading and mathematics assessments are available for use in the year 1 summer term and year 2 autumn term. New year 1 and 2 spring assessments are also available to order. 

Termly KS2 reading, mathematics and grammar and punctuation tests are available for years 3, 4 and 5 and one set of three spelling tests is available for use at any time of year at the teacher’s discretion. New year 6 reading, mathematics and grammar, punctuation and spelling tests are available to order for use in the autumn and spring terms. 

 

We have made some exciting additions to the NFER Tests range. New materials and tools include:

  • year 1 and 2 spring assessments, to help you identify areas of development and support midway through the key stage 1 years
  • year 6 autumn and spring assessments, enabling you to confidently measure pupils’ performance early on in year 6
  • brand new and extensive diagnostic guides, included with each year 6 teacher guide, to help identify strengths and weaknesses ahead of the KS2 national curriculum assessments
  • Our standardised assessments are also supported by a free, easy-to-use online analysis tool, to help you get even more from your NFER Tests data.

Our termly assessments are standardised with over 60,000 children to ensure age-appropriate materials and meaningful data.

True to the model of all NFER assessment development, NFER Tests are the end result of extensive review, trialling and analysis. Our materials are developed by our team of over 30 assessment specialists, who work in collaboration with teachers to ensure they are based on a deep knowledge of children’s development, curricula and the needs of teachers and pupils.

Every step of our robust development process is kept in-house, which means we can use all the knowledge gained from developing assessments for over 70 years to ensure our standardised assessments are of the highest quality. When schools choose NFER Tests, they can be confident they are choosing materials that are appealing to young children, and provide teachers with accurate and useful data.

Yes! Sample materials for years 1-6 are available to view here. To help you review the quality typical of NFER materials, whilst retaining the integrity of the published standardised papers, these sample materials are representative of the content, layout and question types you can expect to find in our NFER Tests and not the actual materials themselves.

We offer comprehensive marking guidance and help to analyse and interpret test results. Teacher guides for each subject, term and year are available to purchase. Many of our teacher guides include diagnostic guidance and our new year 6 teacher guides include a separate extensive diagnostic guidance booklet.

All teacher guides also include free access to our online analysis tool. This tool will help you get even more from your NFER Tests data by automatically converting your raw scores into standardised and age-standardised scores and enabling you to generate a series of easy-to-interpret reports.  More information on this online tool can be found here.

 

  • the Standardised Progress report which makes a direct comparison between pupils’ scores on two different assessments
  • the Question Level Analysis report which gives a more granular breakdown of results by question instead of test
  • the Programme of Study report which shows your class average against areas of curriculum focus
  • the Age-related Expectation report which shows pupils’ standardised scores and whether they have met the age-related expectations on the summer reading and mathematics tests.

Teacher guides are available for each year, term and subject and include look up guides to help you calculate standardised scores, but the quickest and easiest way to convert your data, is with the NFER Tests Analysis Tool. Simply enter your pupils' test marks and birth dates, and this easy-to-use online tool will enable you to:

  • automatically convert raw scores to standardised and age-standardised scores
  • monitor pupil progress and attainment against national standards
  • identify strengths and weaknesses in order to inform next teaching steps
  • generate a series of easy-to-interpret reports, in a format that is suitable for sharing with governors
    and parents.

You can find out more about this tool including availability and access arrangements here.

Our termly tests produce valuable data to help inform ongoing teaching and learning. This data includes
both standardised and age-standardised scores, which allow pupil attainment to be benchmarked
nationally, as well as enabling meaningful comparisons between pupils and groups of pupils. Using
NFER Tests at different points in the year enables progress to be monitored within a year and year-on-year by comparing pupils’ standardised scores over a period of time.

When used at two points in the school year, standardised scores can be used to evidence progress made in the year. For example, if a pupil takes the year 3 autumn reading test in September and the year 3 summer reading test in June, then the progress made in these eight months can be monitored.

When using NFER Tests year-on-year, standardised scores enable progress to be monitored from one year to the next. For example, teachers will be able to look at the progress made by a pupil who took the year 3 summer reading tests and then took the year 4 summer reading test the following year.

Our tests support teachers by providing evidence of attainment and progress through the provision of:

  • Standardised scores which allow teachers to compare pupil performance with a nationally representative sample of 60,000 pupils.
  • Age-standardised scores which allow teachers to compare pupil performance, taking into account that older pupils in the year group will typically have slightly higher average raw scores.
  • Age-related expectation outcomes (reading and mathematics summer tests only) which provide insight into whether pupils are meeting the standards expected for their year group at the end of each school year and are based on the national curriculum requirements.

NFER Tests include access to a free online analysis tool to help you generate a series of useful reports and analyses in just a few clicks!

Diagnostic commentaries are included in the teacher guides for many of our tests to help identify gaps in learning and support teaching and intervention. This diagnostic guidance is provided in:

  • spring term teacher guides across all subjects
  • grammar and punctuation, and spelling teacher guide
  • year 6 autumn and spring materials across all subjects (a separate, extensive diagnostic guidance booklet is included with each teacher guide).

It is likely that grammar and punctuation expectations will vary considerably as teachers and pupils become more familiar with the relatively new Programme of Study requirements in this area of the curriculum. Therefore, we do not currently provide age-related expectation information for the grammar and punctuation tests: a standard setting exercise will be carried out when teacher and pupil familiarity with this curriculum area is more developed. 

The DfE use scaled scores in order to maintain the same expected standard across different tests. As there are new KS2 tests each year, it is very difficult to develop two tests that are exactly comparable in terms of the level of difficulty. A scaled score is used to hold the expected standard constant; the average score may go up or down depending on the difficulty of the test in that year.

Schools using the NFER Tests will use the same tests every year (during the life of the test) so there is no need to use a scaled score. It is more useful to produce a standardised score where the national average is fixed at 100. This allows you to see how children are performing compared to the national average and to compare the performance of different cohorts.

The autumn and spring tests make allowances for the fact that pupils have not studied the full curriculum for the current school year. This means that for maths, the tests cover a small proportion of content from the curriculum of the previous year with the majority of content from the current year’s curriculum. For reading, some of the texts included are not as demanding. This ensures that there are questions which all pupils feel confident they can attempt. However, there are still questions that challenge the more able pupils and allow them to demonstrate their ability. For this reason, it is not appropriate to provide an age-related expectation outcome at this point; most pupils will likely be below the standard expected at the end of the year due to limited coverage of the content for that year. The autumn and spring tests provide both standardised and age-standardised scores so attainment is still measured.

The primary use of both the autumn and spring tests is to provide formative rather than summative information. The autumn tests are useful for establishing a baseline while both sets of tests can provide diagnostic information identifying strengths and weaknesses of either classes or individuals. Used in conjunction with the summer tests, the autumn and spring tests are intended to aid monitoring of progress within the school year. In many cases progress will be as expected – children will maintain their position relative to the national average. Others may make small incremental steps of progress improving their relative position whereas others may slip backwards – these are the children that you may wish to then monitor more carefully in the following year.

A standardised score of 100 is not the same as, nor equivalent to, the year 6 scaled score of 100. On NFER tests, a standardised score of 100 represents the average performance of the sample. The scaled score of 100 represents the ‘expected standard’, as defined by the DfE, and is not the same as an average score. The measure of age-related expectations provided in the summer tests may be a better guide, but we do not claim to provide any measure that explicitly predicts or mirrors the year 6 scaled score.

We recommend using the new data within the NFER Tests Analysis tool as this will give you access to the automated graphical outputs. These will make it easier for you to explain to parents the progress their children are making within and across years.

We recommend that you use the updated standardisation data as this will give you a more accurate picture over time.

The privacy notice for NFER Tests is available here.

The privacy notice for the NFER Tests Progress Tool is available here.

Year 3

Year 3 Mathematics

Test 1 Arithmetic

Test 2 Reasoning

Test 3 Reasoning

Total - whole assessment

Time

25 minutes

30 minutes

30 minutes

85 minutes

Marks

30

25

25

80

 

Year 3 Reading

Test 1

Test 2

Total - whole assessment

Time

45 minutes

45 minutes

90 minutes

Marks

24-25

25-26

50-51

 

Year 4

Year 4 Mathematics

Test 1 Arithmetic

Test 2 Reasoning

Test 3 Reasoning

Total - whole assessment

Time

25 minutes

35 minutes

35 minutes

95 minutes

Marks

35

30

30

95

 

Year 4 Reading

Test 1

Test 2

Total - whole assessment

Time

45 minutes

45 minutes

90 minutes

Marks

25

25

50

If pupils are still working through the tests at the end of the time allowed, they receive a notification and will be able to finish the question they are currently working on. As soon as they click on ‘Next question’, the tests will end.