If you have a child in Primary 7 gearing up for the SEAG Transfer Test, I can probably guess what your weekends look like right now. The kitchen table is buried under practice papers, there's a familiar hum of anxiety in the air, and you've suddenly found yourself trying to relearn long division over your Saturday morning coffee. Not every family opts into the test, of course, but for those who do, November casts a long, looming shadow. It's incredibly easy to let the pressure consume your home

Somewhere between the registration form and the results letter, every 11+ parent runs into a wall of unfamiliar terms — "Standardised Age Score," "adaptive testing," "stanine." None of it is complicated once someone explains it plainly. That's what this page is for: a quick, honest reference you can come back to whenever a new term lands in your inbox.

If you've heard your child is sitting the CAT4, it's worth understanding one thing straight away: unlike GL Assessment's county 11+ papers, CAT4 isn't primarily a pass-or-fail entrance exam. It's the Cognitive Abilities Test, Fourth Edition — a reasoning assessment, also published by GL Assessment, used by schools across the UK to understand how a child thinks, rather than what they've been taught.