📅 Daily Practice
A mixed set picked just for you — due topics and a few new ones, 10 questions.
📄 Past Papers
Real SATs papers back to 2000, organised by year — free, no sign-up, no cost.
About the KS2 reasoning papers
Reasoning is Papers 2 and 3 of the Year 6 maths SATs. Each paper is worth 35 marks and lasts 40 minutes, with no calculator. Instead of plain calculations, the questions put maths into real situations: money, measures, charts, shapes and puzzles.
What comes up most
Across the last five real papers, the biggest topics were:
- Measures and converting units: grams and kilograms, millimetres and metres, litres.
- Money: totals, change and best buys.
- Shape: properties of 2-D and 3-D shapes, angles and nets.
- Tables and charts: reading bar charts, line graphs, tables and pie charts.
- Fractions, time, rounding, coordinates and multi-step word problems.
Tips that get marks
- Read the question twice, and underline what it is actually asking for.
- Show your method on questions with a method box. Many 2 and 3-mark questions give marks for a correct method even if the final answer is wrong.
- Check your units. If a question asks for kilograms, don't give an answer in grams.
- Estimate first. A quick rough answer tells you if your real answer is sensible.
Every question in the practice above is tagged with its national curriculum content domain code, so you can see exactly which part of the curriculum it tests.
Ready for a full practice run? Try the free SATs mock papers, which have answer booklets, or the real government papers on the past papers page.