.Matthew has been placed in the C stream for now as I phoned the SENCo in July to find out where he was to be placed following these Cat tests and his Sats scores. He said that they were putting him in a large class of 30 in the C stream which I thought would be too much for Matthew too soon, so after some discussion the Senco decided he would be placed in a class of 14 children. I did not know at the time the actual Cat scores and assumed that he had done particularly poorly.
There was a Parents evening Monday and the CAT results were given out along with a presentation as to how the school interprets them. The average range the school uses is 95-105, tighter limits than usually published, they also use the upper confidence limit scores as the children's full potential, so that's 5 above the SAS score.
Naturally we had some question for the teacher, such as "how did you decide on the stream for Matthew?" The teachers are actuallly already discussing what to do with him and have been for a few weeks, he is a "quandry". They might possibly move him to the "B" stream at half term but want to make absolutely sure he would be able to cope. We are happy to go with the decision they make as they know what they are talking about - I think.
1 thing that worries me is that they think the lower verbal score is due to Matthew going to welsh school which is probably true to a small extent, but to me it is more the dyslexia . I also discovered 1 friend's son from the welsh school had 2 average and a below average in his CAT tests but he is in the "A" stream due to the his SATS being level 5s. The feeder schools have all been practising the tests - although how you can practise your ability to a higher level I don't know, the welsh school being a non feeder didn't do this, and I see this practise as unhelpful almost as though they are trying to cheat the system- to what end? The teacher also explained how these streams are all "fluid" and they will be moving the children around so I think any attempt to push up grades by the primarys should be ironed out, (some schools also push the SAT levels up as it's all done on teacher assessments in Wales).
