CAT4 explained, for parents in the UAE

Almost every child at a British school in the UAE takes the CAT4 at some point, and most parents first hear the name in a letter home. This guide explains what the test is, what each part of it asks a child to do, when it happens, and what the school does with the result afterwards.

What CAT4 is

CAT4 stands for Cognitive Abilities Test, Fourth Edition. It is published by GL Assessment, a UK test publisher. GL describes it as a test of developed ability and likely academic potential, and says plainly that it is not based on any curriculum and does not depend on prior learning. That is the point of it. A spelling test tells a school what a child has been taught. CAT4 is built to say something about how a child thinks, whatever school they came from.

It covers ages 6 to 17 and above, and comes in nine levels of difficulty, from Level X and Pre-A through to Level G. The school picks the level that matches your child’s year group. Three of the four parts use no English at all, which is why the test is often used with children who have only recently started learning in English.

The four batteries, in plain words

A battery is just a section of the test. CAT4 has four, and each one contains two smaller tests for all but the youngest children. Here is what each one asks a child to do.

The verbal battery is the one that depends on English. If your child is still building English, a low verbal score sitting well below the other three often says more about language than about reasoning. Schools have a name for this gap. They call it the verbal deficit, and it is one of the first things a good school looks at in the data.

How long it takes

GL sets the timings, and they depend on the level your child sits.

The parts are usually spread across more than one day, and the test is taken online during the school day. It is not an exam in the normal sense. There is nothing to revise and no syllabus to cover.

When your child sits it in the UAE

This is the part that surprises parents who have moved from the UK. In the UAE, cognitive ability testing is part of what the school regulators ask for, so it happens on a schedule rather than only when a family applies somewhere.

In Dubai the cognitive ability test sits alongside two other requirements: a reading test three times a year for Years 2 to 10, and curriculum-based progress tests in maths, English and science for Years 4 to 10. Abu Dhabi added the cognitive ability test to its list for 2025 to 2026, so some families there will be seeing a CAT4 letter for the first time.

Some schools test every year rather than every other year. Named schools that publicly run CAT4 include Nord Anglia International School Dubai, Raffles International School, Dubai International Academy at Al Barsha and Emirates Hills, and GEMS Wesgreen International School in Sharjah.

CAT4 and school admissions

Schools use CAT4 results for more than one job. The common ones are setting a baseline for a new pupil, grouping children by ability, spotting children who need stretching, spotting children who need help, and predicting how a year group is likely to do at GCSE. Many selective schools also ask for a recent CAT4 score as part of an application.

A worked example helps here. Dubai College takes its main intake at Year 7, and its own admissions pages set out how it works. Children sit the entrance assessment in Year 6, in November, for entry the following August. The assessment is an adaptive online test of about two hours covering English, maths and non-verbal reasoning, and the school says the style is very similar to standard online testing programmes such as CAT4 and GL Progress Tests. Alongside the assessment, the school asks families to send the end of Year 5 school report, the end of Year 5 GL Progress Test results, and the most recent CAT4 or standardised test results.

So the honest picture is this. The CAT4 your child sits in Year 4 and Year 6 at their current school is often the score that travels with an application to a selective school. That is worth knowing, and it is also a reason not to panic about any single sitting.

What you can usefully do

CAT4 is designed to resist coaching, and heavy drilling mostly buys a child anxiety. Three things genuinely help, and none of them look like exam prep.

• Make the format familiar. A child who has never seen a shape sequence question loses time working out what is being asked. Seeing a handful of each type once removes that. Our guide to non-verbal reasoning question types shows what they look like.
• Keep reading in English. The verbal battery is the one where language gets in the way of reasoning, and reading is the only thing that reliably moves it.
• Fix the ordinary gaps. The quantitative battery leans on number sense. A child who is shaky on times tables is slower on it, and that is a curriculum problem with a curriculum fix.

That last one is where we can help. Our free Skills Check takes about ten minutes and tells you where your child actually is against the National Curriculum for their school year. It does not predict a CAT4 score and it does not pretend to. It answers a different and more fixable question: which parts of maths or English are secure, and which are not.

When the results come back

You will usually get a parent report with a set of numbers on it: a Standard Age Score for each battery, a stanine, and a national percentile rank. Those numbers are less scary than they look once you know what they mean. Our guide to CAT4 scores works through each one, including what an SAS of 100 or 115 actually tells you.