SATs Greater Depth Explained: Why There Is No Greater-Depth Score

1. Home
2. ›
3. Blog
4. ›
5. SATs Greater Depth Explained

There is no such thing as a "greater depth scaled score" at KS2 SATs, and no test paper - Reading, Grammar, Punctuation and Spelling (GPS), or Mathematics - produces a "greater depth" result. "Greater Depth" (GDS) is a teacher assessment judgement that applies to one subject only: Writing. It sits alongside two other writing judgements - working towards the expected standard, and working at the expected standard - and it is built up by a class teacher from a body of a child's writing across the school year, not generated by an exam board from a marked test paper. The scaled scores your child receives in Reading, GPS, and Maths run from 80 to 120, and a score of 110 or more in those subjects is officially called the "higher standard" - a different accountability measure entirely, produced a completely different way. Confusing the two is extremely common, and it is an easy mistake to make, because the government's own published statistics group both concepts under a single headline figure. This guide separates the two clearly, using the current 2026 official scaled score conversion tables and the Standards and Testing Agency's teacher assessment framework, so you know exactly what your child's results actually mean.

What "Greater Depth" Actually Means at KS2 SATs

"Greater Depth" is shorthand for "working at greater depth within the expected standard" (GDS) - one of three possible judgements a Year 6 teacher can award for Writing under the statutory Teacher Assessment Framework (TAF) published by the Standards and Testing Agency. The three judgements are: working towards the expected standard (WTS), working at the expected standard (EXS), and working at greater depth within the expected standard (GDS). These are not percentages, marks, or scores of any kind - they are categorical judgements, similar in spirit to a pass/merit/distinction system, decided by the class teacher using a checklist of specific "can do" statements that a pupil's writing must demonstrate consistently across the year, not on a single day.

Crucially, Writing is not sat as a formal test at all. There is no Writing exam paper in the KS2 SATs week. Reading, GPS, and Mathematics are the three subjects tested externally through marked papers; Writing and Science are assessed internally by teachers using government frameworks, with only Writing subject to moderation by the local authority to check consistency between schools. This is the single fact that resolves almost all of the confusion around "greater depth": it is a writing-only, teacher-only judgement, and it cannot appear anywhere on a scaled-score report for a subject that was never assessed by a test in the first place.

Why "Greater Depth" Gets Confused With a Scaled Score of 110

The confusion has a genuine, traceable cause, and it is not simply parents misremembering a term. The Department for Education's own key stage 2 attainment methodology defines an official accountability measure called the "higher standard". For the tested subjects - Reading, Mathematics, and GPS - the higher standard is defined precisely as a scaled score of 110 or more. Separately, for Writing, the DfE defines the higher standard equivalent as the teacher assessment judgement "working at greater depth". Both of these - the 110+ scaled score in the tested subjects, and greater depth in writing - are reported together under the same combined national headline statistic (the percentage of pupils reaching the higher standard in reading, writing and mathematics combined). There is officially no "higher standard" measure at all for Science, because Science teacher assessment does not have an equivalent category.

Because these two very different measures - one numeric and test-derived, one categorical and teacher-derived - are published side by side under one combined statistic, it is an entirely understandable leap for a parent (or a hastily written parenting blog) to assume "greater depth" simply means "scaled score of 110 or above" across every subject. It does not. It is worth being precise about this distinction, because it affects how you should actually read your child's results: a scaled score of 110 in Maths tells you your child sat a marked test and answered a defined number of questions correctly; "greater depth" in Writing tells you a teacher judged a term's worth of writing against a specific set of criteria. They measure fundamentally different things, arrived at through fundamentally different processes, even though both sit under the "higher standard" umbrella term in DfE statistics.

How KS2 Scaled Scores Actually Work

Reading, GPS, and Mathematics are marked externally by markers appointed by the Standards and Testing Agency, and the raw number of marks a pupil earns is then converted into a scaled score running from 80 (the lowest score reported) to 120 (the highest score reported). A scaled score of 100 always represents "the expected standard" for Year 6, regardless of which year's test a child sat - this is the entire purpose of scaling. Raw test papers vary slightly in difficulty from year to year, so the STA recalculates the conversion table annually to ensure that a scaled score of 100 always represents the same underlying level of attainment, even though the exact number of raw marks needed to reach it changes each year.

This is also precisely why you cannot simply reuse last year's conversion table, and why we verified the current year's figures directly against the STA's own published document rather than assuming they carry over. The table below shows the confirmed 2026 conversion points for the expected standard (scaled score 100) and the higher standard (scaled score 110) in each tested subject.

These figures are taken directly from the Standards and Testing Agency's 2026 key stage 2 scaled score conversion tables published on GOV.UK. Note how differently the threshold behaves across subjects: reaching the higher standard in Reading requires 14 additional raw marks above the expected standard out of a maximum of 50 (a large proportional jump), while in GPS it requires 21 additional marks out of 70, and in Maths it requires 38 additional marks out of 110. The scaled score system deliberately compresses and stretches raw marks differently in different regions of the scale, which is another reason a single "greater depth = 110" rule of thumb, even if it were correctly limited to test scores, oversimplifies how differently that threshold actually behaves subject to subject.

What Does the Writing Teacher Assessment Framework Actually Require for Greater Depth?

The Teacher Assessment Framework (TAF) for Writing sets out a list of specific "pupil can" statements for each of the three standards, and a teacher must have evidence that a pupil meets every statement for a standard, consistently, across a range of writing produced over the year - not just in one piece of work. To be judged as working at greater depth, a pupil must first meet every "working at the expected standard" statement, and then additionally demonstrate a further, more demanding set of skills. These include: writing effectively and in a way that shows awareness of the reader for a range of purposes and audiences, drawing on reading to inform the vocabulary and grammar of their own writing; distinguishing between the language of speech and writing, and choosing the appropriate register for the task; selecting vocabulary and grammatical structures that reflect what the writing requires, doing this mostly appropriately; and using the full range of punctuation taught at key stage 2 mostly correctly, using it precisely, where needed, to enhance meaning and avoid ambiguity.

What is notable about this list is how much it emphasises deliberate authorial control rather than simply the absence of errors. A pupil working at the expected standard can write accurately; a pupil working at greater depth demonstrates that they are choosing their language, structure, and punctuation on purpose, for effect, across different types of writing. This is inherently a much harder thing to assess than a right-or-wrong test answer, which is exactly why it requires a professional teacher judgement built from a portfolio of work rather than a single marked paper - there is no possible multiple-choice or short-answer format that could reliably test "does this child understand why they chose this word over that one".

How You Will Actually See This on Your Child's Results

When your child's results come home, typically in the last two weeks of the summer term, you should expect to see two entirely different formats, and it is worth knowing in advance what each will look like so nothing is misread. For Reading, GPS, and Mathematics, you will see a number between 80 and 120 next to each subject, plus a short statement confirming whether the expected standard was met. You will never see the words "greater depth" attached to these three subjects, because that phrase is not part of how test results are reported - if a scaled score of 110 or more appears, some schools may additionally note that this meets the "higher standard", but this is a different label from "greater depth" and schools that use correct DfE terminology will not conflate the two.

For Writing, you will instead see one of three words or codes: "working towards", "working at the expected standard" (sometimes abbreviated EXS), or "working at greater depth" (GDS). There is no number attached to this judgement at all. For Science, you will see only "working at the expected standard" or "has not met the expected standard" - there is no greater depth category for Science, and no higher standard measure either, since Science teacher assessment does not include one. If your child's school report describes a reading, GPS, or maths result using the words "greater depth", it is technically using informal shorthand rather than the DfE's own terminology - worth flagging politely with the school if you want the most precise picture of what has actually been measured.

What to Do If Your Child Is Aiming for Greater Depth in Writing

Because greater depth in Writing is a portfolio-based teacher judgement rather than a single test result, preparation looks quite different from revising for Reading, GPS, or Maths. There is no past paper to practise, because there is no paper. Instead, the most effective approach focuses directly on the "pupil can" statements themselves: building a child's ability to write purposefully for different audiences (a persuasive letter reads differently from a descriptive narrative, and a child working at greater depth can consciously shift between them); developing genuine control over formal and informal register, so a child can explain, in their own words, why they chose one phrase over another; expanding precise, deliberate vocabulary choices rather than simply "impressive" words used incorrectly; and practising the full range of KS2 punctuation - not just full stops and commas, but semicolons, colons, dashes, and brackets - used accurately and for a clear purpose, since accuracy without purposeful use will not meet the greater depth bar on its own.

Because the assessment window runs across the whole of Year 6 rather than a single exam day, the most useful thing a parent can do early in the year is ask the child's teacher which specific "pupil can" statements the child is currently missing, rather than asking for a general sense of "how they're doing" - this framework-specific conversation tends to produce a much more actionable answer, because it is the exact list the school itself uses when making the final judgement in the summer term.

Common Misunderstandings Worth Correcting

Several widely shared parent guides state, in one section, that a scaled score of "110 or more" means a child has achieved greater depth, while elsewhere on the very same page correctly noting that GDS is "reserved for writing assessments only" - an internal contradiction that we checked directly rather than simply repeating. If you come across this claim, treat it as informal shorthand for the higher standard measure in the tested subjects, not as an accurate description of how greater depth is actually awarded. A second common misunderstanding is assuming a high scaled score in Reading or Maths somehow feeds into, or predicts, a greater depth judgement in Writing - it does not, because the two are assessed through entirely separate processes with no formal link between them, even though a child who is strong across the curriculum will often, unsurprisingly, do well at both.

A third misunderstanding worth flagging: assuming greater depth is a fixed percentile, like "top 10%". It is not a norm-referenced ranking at all - it is a criterion-referenced judgement, meaning a teacher checks a child's writing against a fixed list of statements, and any number of children in a class, in principle, could meet them (or none could). National statistics published after results day do show what proportion of pupils nationally reached greater depth in a given year, which understandably creates the impression of a ranking, but the assessment itself does not work by ranking children against each other - it works by checking evidence against a checklist. For families weighing this alongside 11 plus preparation, our complete KS2 SATs parent guide and our grammar school preparation guide cover how SATs results and grammar school entrance testing interact more broadly.

Frequently Asked Questions

For the full official detail behind the figures in this guide, see the Standards and Testing Agency's 2026 key stage 2 scaled score conversion tables on GOV.UK. For related preparation, see our SATs tuition service, our primary tuition service, and our 11 plus tuition page for families juggling both SATs and grammar school preparation in the same year.