Year 6 maths SAT: numbers with commas The simple comma shows just how muddled government thinking has been in relation to mathematics in primary school and will undoubtedly cause problems for our children. The first round of the new KS2 SATs used a comma to separate the thousands from the hundreds, tens and units: e.g. 44,678. Previously it has been the norm to leave a small gap e.g. 45 678 The UK has become the only European country to use the comma for separating large numbers in this way. Every other country uses the comma to denote a decimal mark – so what is written as 1.2 in the UK is 1,2 in the rest of the continent. Not only in Europe but most of the rest of the world use the comma as a decimal mark. One in five of our children are classified as EAL (English as an additional language) many of whom will be used to using the comma as a decimal. Despite the Association of Maths Teachers and many other bodies arguing that it is simple wrong to use a comma to split thousands from hundreds, the test writers have gone ahead and now schools will have to teach it, although nowhere does it appear in the programme of study. I think that the thing which annoys me most is that the government is trying to encourage young children to become proficient with computer programming, but if commas are used in almost all computer programming languages the program will treat the number as a list of separate numbers and the program will not work. I apologise for adding worksheets with commas in to our KS2 Arithmetic Paper category, but if children are to be tested in this way then it is only fair to give them a chance to work with them. At the moment our sets of worksheets including commas are limited to: Add up to 4-digits with commas (4C2) Addition: more than 4-digits with commas (5C2) Subtract 4-digit numbers with commas (4C2) Subtract numbers with more than 4-digits with commas (5C2) Divide a 4-digit number by 1-digit, with commas (5C7b) Go to Year 6 maths SAT: numbers with commas