Cats?

[Darem]

Just found out about the Cats tests in Year 7.
Is it wise to just let the school get on with them or should I be helping my child in terms of understanding how they work (haven't got a clue at the moment!)
From the brief read I've had, it's about verbal/non verbal reasoning?
Or am I getting confused with 11+?
Any advice gratefully received,
thanks!

It's very important that the students don't prepare in a tutory way. We don't let ours know when it's happening. They are a baseline assessment.

The idea of Cats is to give the teachers an accurate idea of where your DC is, academically speaking, so they can be put in the correct set for their level. Trying to cram for them would completely ruin the point.

This is why secondary schools can't rely on Sats results for setting - too many children have spent months being pushed to work on them, which means that their results are not an accurate reflection of their abilities, just on the ability of their teachers to teach for the test.

Would be interested to hear more about how these work. A year ago I was wondering whether to "tutor" DS for these, and in the end decided to just see what happened.

According to parents evening his came out very high, but his schoolwork does not reflect his scores. (In the words of his tutor, "gifted and talented, but at what?")
So it would seem he is gifted at CATS, shame there isn't a GCSE in them

I thought CATS were indicative of potential rather than where they were academically.
DC's school use both CATs and SATs for setting, but at dcs school they take the CATs in july before they start as part of transfer day.

Choccyp1g
CATs or made up of Non Verbal reasoning, Verbal reasoning and Quantative reasoning. They assess the childs reasoning . Uneven CATs scores can indicate there may be a learning difficulty such as dyslexia

Hi Bruffin thanks for your comment. That confirms what I suspected: that DS is "clever", but not exactly "academic".

At his school they did the CATS some time into the first term, and the setting hasn't changed much as a result. I've only heard of 2 children moving so far.

We found a lot of samples CATs online for DD tried to get her head around. She wanted to study & practice them. Most of the ones online are devilishly hard imho.
She had them properly during induction (last week) & said some were tough & some were pips. They are mostly logic puzzles, I imagine you could be prepped to do better, but it might be bad if they caused child to go up a set compared to their native ability. DS-y8 is the bottom of his math group by a big margin (never did CATs or SATs they just guessed where to put him), he doesn't seem to mind, thankfully. But some kids would get very demoralised by it.

Let the school get on with them. That's what they are for. The school uses them for external assessment processes. Have a good weekend.