11 Plus Exams Forum

Has anyone else's DC started SATs practice (yr5) in school already?

My DS mentioned yesterday that they had already done a practice paper...

Actually in hindsight - I wonder if this is just for end of year assessment / reports.

My school does 'optional SATS' each school year so maybe this is want your DC has done. I always had to remind my DCs that is was optional for the school not for them individually!

Yes, the QCA tests are being done around now. Results are used to track progress.

Some schools are also doing CAT tests in year 5 now.

Why do some primary schools use cats?

mystery wrote:Why do some primary schools use cats?

At my children's primary they were used for tracking. I was shown ( I didn't ask - it was brought out at parents' evening) a pretty graph which had some lines on it showing my son's expected trajectory. When OFSTED came to the school they must have been shown the same graph as suddenly we were told that son needed to sit level 6 SATs in order to satisfy OSTED that he was being pushed, stretched, challenged etc (all the things I did not want to happen to him at primary school) to make the stats of his CATs and his SATs tally.

Ah OK. So presumably his CATs showed very high ability.

Yes, you might not have wanted you son to do level 6 stuff . However, presumably sometimes CATs will show teachers that they could have misjudged a child --- doing them early year 5 would give time to help a child who was clearly capable of 4s or 5s but had for some reason only be heading towards 3s get out of the mire before starting secondary.

If schools do not do some slightly more objective assessment of ability than just looking at children's school work to date, a small proportion of children could fall through the cracks.

So, as well as saving money by not doing CATs in early year 5, schools have the benefit of not uncovering for themselves that some children could maybe have done better in years 1 to 4, given the help and support that state schools generally don't have time for.

So the job is left to secondaries - they will see the mismatch when they do the CATs in year 7 --- if indeed they do. I guess fewer secondary schools are doing them too.

Do secondary schools that don't use CATs have other ways of doing this which Durham CEM charge for?

The problem with CATs is the hugely wide confidence intervals. Results are taken to be exact by both schools and parents.

True I am sure. Any idea about the confidence intervals on 11plus tests?