Were the year 6 SAT English reading tests more difficult than previous years?

There has been a lot of media coverage on the apparent difficulty of this year’s SATs English reading tests. You can read the official government repsonse here, where they describe the process by which the tests are created and trialled. The conclusion is that “Evidence from these processes indicated that the tests were of similar difficulty to previous years. As a result, we are confident the test was set to an appropriate level of difficulty.”