SEAG Test – 10 Tips
Our son did the SEAG test in November 2023. It was zero fun. Here are some of the things we wish we’d known and some of the things we did which worked for us.
What is SEAG?
SEAG is short for the Schools’ Entrance Assessment Group. It’s a group of schools which administers the transfer test in Northern Ireland. So if your child wants to go to a grammar school in Northern Ireland, they sit the SEAG Entrance Assessment.
There used to be two versions of the transfer test which ran from 2007 – 2022. These were called AQE and GL. One was multiple choice, one was open text. Different grammar schools adopted one of these and if your child
The entrance assessment / transfer test is made up of two tests that take place on two Saturdays in November. Each test lasts for an hour, has 56 questions, half are about literacy and half are about numeracy. Your child can do the literacy part in either English or Irish.
What We Did / Things That Worked For Us
1. Reading
Massively important. Builds vocabulary, good grammar, understanding, and really helps with the comprehension part of the paper. We didn’t care what Noah read so long as he was reading.
2. Mental Maths
Addition, subtraction, times tables and division. This is also massively important. Helps them do all the maths stuff (area, shapes, arithmetic, money, etc.) superquick.
3. Practice Tests
We did a couple of tests each week over the summer going into P7. Noah started reluctantly but got quite into them.
In P7 he ended up doing two to four per week – Transfer clubs, with the tutor, and one at home.
At the beginning we told him that he wouldn’t know how to do a lot of the questions but just got him to draw question marks beside those ones – so as not to freak him out.
We also tried to do one every Saturday morning because that’s the time of the week when the actual test happens – just as a way of getting his brain and body to go “It’s Saturday morning – time to do a test”.
4. Test Timings and Tips
Timings in tests are good to practise: how long to spend on a question before moving on and getting to know that hard questions carry only one mark, same as easy questions, etc. There are also 56 questions to do in 1 hour so you know that you’ve roughly got one minute per question.
Also: we made sure that Noah knew how to mark his answers properly – drawing a good thick line through the box, not a faint one.
Some people used highlighters to highlight key parts of the questions or bits of the comprehension, but we didn’t discover this until much later so we didn’t do that.
Noah had always been slow to start schoolwork and tests: he’d spend ages sorting out his pens and getting himself settled, then he’d zoom through it but didn’t always get things finished in time. So we practised that sort of thing to get him able to just start quickly and go.
5. Transfer Clubs
Noah’s school ran a transfer club after school on a Tuesday which was great. A whole bunch from his class stayed after school on a Tuesday, being coached a bit more by their teachers and doing practice tests.
One of the local grammar schools which was actually going to a test centre ran a Saturday morning Transfer Club. It was good experience for Noah: it was at the same time and place where he would be doing the actual test and he got to see who else was doing the test.
6. Tutors
We found a brilliant tutor. It was good having him a) to find to make sure we didn’t miss or mis-teach any key concepts at home, and he was able to reinforce what we being taught in school.
He was also very good with Noah, able to have the ‘bants’ about football but was also very kind, encouraging and supportive.
The thing about the tutor is to make sure they support what’s being done in class and don’t undermine the teacher (which just puts everyone in bad form or makes everyone unnecessarily worried).
7. Outside Activities
He kept on all his outside-school stuff – BB once a week, football x 4 per week, after-school sports once a week. He missed a few Saturday morning football matches in October and November to go to the Rainey transfer club. The only thing we let slide was piano (which he hated anyway :D) The extra-curricular stuff was good
8. Social
We did some of the tests with Noah so it was more social for him and he didn’t feel like he was on his own with the whole thing.
9. The Dip
Noah had a dip around October – his scores started going down. He got test fatigue while at the same time the practice questions started getting harder. His mood also dipped. But it happened to almost everyone other kid too. It’s a thing.
In Noah’s case we just asked him to keep at it a bit longer and explained it’s the maddest exam he’ll ever do.
10. On The Day
We didn’t do any special stuff the night before. It was like every other Friday night. No drama, no big things, no special treats, and bed at the usual time (not too early, not too late). But that’s just our style and every family is different.
On the morning of each test Noah and I did football passing in our yard for 20 minutes and just chatted – we do that a lot and that’s his happy activity when he’s most relaxed.
Nomie organised for us to go go-karting after the first test just to divert him. And one of his friends had a birthday party after the second one which was the ultimate distraction.
SEAG Resources
SEAG Official Website
The official SEAG website is a great resource: it has practice papers and the Specification (all the stuff that will be covered in a SEAG test) and a pretty good FAQs section.
SEAG Support Group
The best place on the entire internet for SEAG tips and sanity is the SEAG Support Group on Facebook. It’s run by a lady called Ola Lynch and it’s solid gold.
Olga provides advice and updates, steers the conversation and crowd-sources questions and answers. It is a phenomenal resource.
Practice Papers
- On Target are used by the schools and by some tutors. In retrospect, these turned out to be about the level of the actual 2023 test.
- The Catapult test papers were really good but really scary. Really hard. Noah’s marks with the On Target tests were in the 90s but with these ones he dropped down to 75% at first. They demoralised Noah for a while but there are great learnings in them and they’re good for challenging him.
- The Gorilla test papers were good too. We only discovered them towards the end.
The new batch of practice tests this year should be better, now that this is the second year and everyone knows what the actual tests are like. With Noah’s year, it just just guesswork.
