What’s New for 2026?
In the first three SEAG cycles, starting 2023 through to 2025, The Catapult Papers focused on providing a very high volume of challenging questions – to the extent that these would be the most challenging practice papers on the market. As such, they were not intended to be a barometer for how each child would actually perform in November’s tests. The goal was to ensure that ‘all bases were covered’. After all, there was no way of knowing what the trickiest questions would be in the official exams each year so, by increasing the number of difficult questions in each practice paper, children would be less overawed by the handful of tough questions they would eventually face in November’s papers.
While this approach certainly bore fruit in a lot of cases (parental feedback regularly expressed gratitude for how children were kept on their toes constantly) there were many children who were not ready for the intensified approach. This meant that The Catapult Papers were becoming prohibitive to some kids, rather than helpful. By seeing their scores drop by more than 10% compared to tests from other companies, there was a danger that these papers could be playing a role in a loss of confidence among some children – something that they were never designed to do.
So, in autumn 2025, I decided to take a more data-driven approach to The Catapult Papers. I wanted to maintain their edge, as well as their visual appeal, but I also wanted to make sure they weren’t drifting too far above the expected level that your child should attain to in November. I scoured through the two official sample papers on the SEAG website and used a simple metric for scoring each test’s overall difficulty level.
If a question was straightforward (not necessarily ‘easy’, but something we should nevertheless expect P7 pupils to handle) then the question scored a 1.
If a question required a higher level of subject knowledge, or several steps for solving, but was still based on something clearly taught and practised in the NI Curriculum, then the question scored a 2.
If a question was uniquely challenging, and required the student to apply independent thinking skills to find the solution (building on what they had learned from the NI Curriculum), then the question scored a 3.
This scoring system would lead to a data-based understanding of SEAG expectations, and in turn help me recalibrate all current series of The Catapult Papers (Main Series, Warm-Up Series, and Schools Series) to a level more closely matched to the official SEAG sample tests.
Using this approach, the two official SEAG sample tests scored in the high 90s and mid 90s (these are not percentage scores; the maximum score is 168).
It was then time for me to apply the same approach to the 2025 versions of The Catapult Papers. As expected, their scores were significantly higher: averaging around 110. But there were a few outliers that were scoring as high as 120. In other words, something had to change.
And this is the story of how the 2026 Edition of The Catapult Papers began!
I started with the 40 test papers in the Schools Series. The first half of this series is designed for P6 pupils, so the difficulty level had to be significantly lower than those from the official SEAG sample papers. The first test papers were recalibrated so that their difficulty score was in the low 80s. Bit by bit, the difficulty level would go up by a point at a time so that children would have summer tests with a difficulty score in the low-to-mid 90s. Then, the final set of papers in that series would bring that level up to the high 90s (no test scored above 100).
The P6 Warm-Up Series of ten papers (for home use) was next. These now begin at a ‘difficulty score’ of 80 for Test 1, and finish with a score of 89 for Test 10 – an ideal entry point for trying the Main Series of 20 papers that are at P7 level.
Finally the Main Series of The Catapult Papers (for home use) received the same treatment. These begin at a scoring level of 90 and work their way up to 99 by the end of the series.
I have managed to maintain many of the challenging questions that made the original versions of The Catapult Papers as equally popular as they were unpopular! But there has been a significant decrease in the volume of these questions. In other words, it is now much less likely that children will see some Catapult Papers and start thinking, “Oh no! Here come the deadly ones!”
Mind you, they won’t be celebrating either. I would never promise that! But I firmly believe that the 2026 Edition of The Catapult Papers is as good as you are going to get for the Transfer Test practice season.