PIPS anyone?

[orienteerer]

I remember last year when DS was in Yr 1 he mentioned they spent the day doing "tests" on the computer. He has just repeated the process and I have discovered it was PIPS. I mentioned it at parents "evening" this afternoon and am not really much the wiser (I know it's online verbal reasoning etc). I've looked at the PIPS website etc.
I guess I just want to get a better idea of how widespread "PIPS" is, how many schools use it, what is the value of it etc?
FWIW DS is at a independent school and they do SATS.

They use them at independent schools. State schools use cat tests instead.

PIPS, MIDYIS, YELLIS and ALIS tend to be used in independent schools.

They are run by Durham University's Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring. The tests cover basic intelligence, aptitude for individual subjects, and attitudes to learning.

We find the results to be very reliable and helpful. We would not share results with parents or students, though. We use them to know whether students are acheiving well, in line, or below expectations, and therefore to build individual plans for each child. When the students do their GCSEs, their results are mapped to MIDYIS, which then feed into the school's added value statistics.

Thanks MmeB, I got the impression from the teacher that she was not going to share the results with me (not that I asked). I don't have an issue with it but was just curious as I have never heard of them before.
I assume the schools pay to use the PIPS?

Yes, they pay.

DD1 did PIPS in September at her (state) primary. She's in Year 3 and seemed to think the whole school were doing them, so presumably they are doing them as some sort of ongoing benchmarking after the summer holidays.

All schools in Angus use it as far as i am aware, we had the option of sitting in with our children this year.

dc do pips and cats at theirs but not sats. It is a measure of potential rather than ability which school then use (theoretcially at least!) to identify over/under achievers.