Cognitive Testing at School

[purplefeet]

DD (13) has ASC. She is at mainstream secondary school.
Yesterday she came home from school and said that the SENCO had got her to do a cognitive test, but didn't tell her why she was doing it.
I've contacted the school to try to find out and am waiting to hear back. I didn't know anything about it.
I'm just curious as to if this is something that the school is supposed to ask parent/carer permission for. Thank you.

My two with asd had something similar and they were told it was to see if they needed extra time in exams (it was about y8/9). I was told afterwards as one was allocated extra time. The teacher said it could be used as proof they needed extra time and the providing that in exams then meant dc could have it for gcses as it was custom.

CAT tests are frequently administered to all year 7's either for streaming or to gain more information so they can track progress over time. They don't have to ask permission as they assess children all the time. This is just a different way.

As your dd is in year 8/9 I'd want to know if this was a whole cohort assessment or whether there were specific concerns about my DC.

Thank you both so much. I just don’t trust the school and it’s like a fortress trying to find out anything.

If she's in Y9, there won't be any KS2 data, which means there is nothing with which to provide a baseline to measure progress (or identify and document specific abilities/difficulties - a spiky profile can be very telling). The advantage of CAT4s over standard KS2 data is that they don't require specific tuition and indicate raw ability, rather than how well a primary taught to the test. This year, due to the absence of KS2 data, many assessment technology providers, are introducing the facility to use CAT4 data as a baseline instead - because the government, parents, governors, trustees and everybody else will still want to see Progress and performance being measured and challenged, rather than nobody being able to tell whether what they're doing is working or if they've just not bothered because 'there's no data, so the 2020 and 2021 cohort results don't matter'.

It may be that she missed them when the majority of the cohort did them and they're just playing catchup.

If she's in Y8, it's likely to be more for the original purpose of the things - to look beyond what her primary school trained her to do for her benefit.

Thank you that’s really useful to know.

My DD (Y10) seems to do a battery of tests with the SEN department every year (they have her EP reports going back to Y3, plus CATs from Y8 etc).

It's mainly for exam access arrangements - they have tweaked those each year, and there have been a lot of new tests in Y10 for GCSEs. I've never been asked for permission or informed about results. Given how expensive the tests are, I'm mainly just relieved I'm not having to ask for the testing, and that school are on top of making sure everything is in place before exams.