11 Plus Exams Forum

I've seen the opinion expressed on here that the new CEM test in Bucks will only be expecting familiarity with "year 5 work" covered in school.

What is year 5 work? It seems to vary enormously from school to school, and also the NC level of the child on entering year 5.

Indeed. Both my dd's were streamed from Year 2 in English and Maths in a double class intake state primary where the sets were divided between the two classrooms. They had finished the KS2 curriculum in Maths by Spring Term of Y5. Other schools had not even done percentages by January of Y6. Wont they have a problem if they set the bar too low with too many candidates on exactly the same mark? DG

When you say they'd finished the KS2 curriculum in maths - you mean covered level 4b material, or achieved level 4b, or the material and achievement for a higher level? It's all very confusing as different people mean different things.

The top couple of tables were on 5A, the rest of the set were 5's

The curriculum repeats itself adding a bit more each time to a topic. e.g you do fractions in year 2 , by yr 5 you are linking them to decimals and percentages. Data handling goes all the way through school, KS1 will do pictograms and tally charts and by upper KS2 you are talking graphs, mean, mode etc. and interpreting far more complex data.

The use and applying mathematics strand is very important too.

Try googling primary framework, Mystery

I'm sure Guest55 has linked to it before, mystery, but I can't find it just at the moment. I wouldn't worry too much about it until you know about the Kent test anyway, just keep up the usual.

http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov. ... ction/4863" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

try this

Thanks Yoyo. If you mean had covered all the material described in the national numeracy strategy and the old numeracy units then that does havea defined "end" ... but that's just an interpretation of the National Curriculum document isn't it?

5A helps me to understand better what the poster meant by finishing primary school maths.

But I still don't get what people mean by "Year 5 work" - do you mean the Year 5 units Yoyo? Are these purely aiming at national expectations for a year 5 child - i.e. 4b take away 1.5 sublevels? Or what one might expect a year 5 child in the top x% to be covering which would surely be beyond the year 5 units?

30% don't get level 5a in KS2 so I think 'Year 5 work' means the Year 5 units differentiated for those likely to get a level 5 at the end of KS2.

So your child should be towards the top of level 4 at the end of Year 5 ... mystery you are making it too complicated.

I'm making it too complicated?

I'm just trying to work out what people mean.

So you are saying that roughly 30% of children nationally get level 5b (or is it 5c) or higher at the end of KS2, and these are the children that an 11plus test for a county like Bucks should be trying to pick out.

So in Bucks, for a test at the beginning of year 6 you should be trying to pick out children who would have been high 4s at the end of year 5. Then by looking at the archived NNS and the units and differentiating the year 5 work described within that, we have identified the material that a child should have covered by the end of year 5 in maths to have a reasonable shot at the new test in Bucks if this is what CEM have been told to based it on.

Please tell me one more thing - does "differentiating" the year 5 NNS units for the top 30% of the year 5 cohort mean covering those units to the their "ultimate limit" or adding in a touch of year 6 work?

Yes I know that the same topics come up again and again in maths and you can take each topic " a bit further" ... but when does a bit further start being the next year's work and therefore not part of the thing I was trying to define at the beginning? Maths repeats itself for many school years. So do a lot of subjects.