As part of our growing collaboration, CUSP's Curriculum Development Director, Lauren Meadows, explores the complex landscape of school assessment and the innovative steps CUSP is taking to tackle long-standing challenges. Their work aligns closely with our mission at Smartgrade, particularly in reducing workload, improving the usefulness of assessment data, and keeping teaching at the forefront of the process.

Read on to discover how CUSP is rethinking assessment and what this means for schools across our partnership.

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The Knotty Nature of Assessment

Assessment in schools is a complicated business. Here at CUSP HQ, we’ve spent a long time asking ourselves why we do what we do in the way that we do it, and crucially… what if we did it differently? As part of our exploration into assessment practices, we found four key challenges that needed addressing:  

Challenge 1: Many commercially available assessment suites are not aligned with the curriculum sequence which means they often test content before it has been taught, leaving teachers with unhelpful data and pupils feeling demotivated.  

What we’ve done: We have created a suite of curriculum-aligned assessments that enable teachers to quickly and easily identify the specific aspect of the curriculum that needs revisiting for pupils. These assessments are deliberately designed to be more inclusive, yielding useful information about pupils spanning a wider range of attainment. 
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Challenge 2: The disconnect between curriculum and assessment often led to pupils being withdrawn from the curriculum to fill gaps in understanding. This diminished the pupils’ sense of belonging and reduced their time working with the person who knew them best – their class teacher.  

What we’ve done: We’ve plugged the data tool directly into the CUSP curriculum to reduce the need for withdrawal intervention, keeping children connected with their classrooms and utilising quality first teaching as a first response to gaps in understanding. 
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Challenge 3: Teachers were spending vast quantities of time marking and collecting data and this meant less time left to decide how to respond to the data in the classroom.  

What we’ve done: We’ve partnered with the brilliant team at Smartgrade to reduce the workload involved in marking and collecting data, so that time can be spent on making adaptations to classroom practice. In addition, this allows us to standardise results across the CUSP partnership.
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Challenge 4: Each assessment window for Years 2 – 5 Reading, GPS and Maths papers was taking our Trust 25,680 hours to administer – time that would be better used for teaching rich, ambitious curriculum content than testing pupils on content that they hadn’t yet been taught.  

What we’ve done: We’ve taken the brave step to reduce our assessment calendar by a third by replacing the full suite of autumn papers with fluency checks for reading and maths. These are a fundamental building block for success in English and Maths and act as a much stronger predictor of how pupils might perform later on in their education.  

‍If any of these knotty challenges resonate in your own assessment practice, I’d love to hear from you. Over the coming months, I’ll be sharing more about how we developed our assessments, how CUSP Assessments can be used in schools and what we’re learning about their impact. Watch this space!

For more information about Smartgrade's partnership with CUSP, book a demo or find out more.

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