Parents have been reprimanded online by the Department for Education (DfE) for tweeting answers from their children’s Sats exams.

This week, Year 6 children have been taking tests in reading, spelling, punctuation and grammar (Spag) and maths.

0fficials appear to be monitoring social media in a bid to clamp down on cheating. The DfE’s official Twitter account has warned against publishing answers, as some key stage 2 students are still due to sit the assessments.

It wrote: “Some children will be taking the KS2 tests next week using timetable variations. Please help us to keep the test content secure. Thank you.”

The plea followed a series of interventions against disgruntled parents who had aired concerns about questions in their children’s’ tests.

Journalist Matt Thrower used Twitter to query whether a part of his daughter’s maths paper was relevant to the subject, only to receive an official rebuttal.

The DfE told him: “Hi, can you please remove the tweet referring to SATs? We’re trying to maintain the confidentiality & integrity of ongoing tests.”

But the father hit back: “Happy to, once you remove such absurd and pointless questions from your tests.”

Another user complained that a word which had many spellings was too ambiguous to have formed part of his daughter’s spelling test.

When asked by the official account to remove details of the question, he responded: “No. I think #SATs are cruel and unnecessary and cause stress for children. Esp when you get situations like that yesterday. Totally

unfair.”

Yesterday’s maths paper - the final assessment in Sats week - left some children in tears, according to teachers.

But the paper, which was taken by more than 500,000 10- and 11-year-olds yesterday morning, has split opinion among teachers, with some saying that it was what they expected.