A central feature of the recently launched Smartgrade Assessment Series (SAS) is a focus on curriculum-aligned mathematics assessments. In this article, Joshua Perry explains why this is such an important factor for Smartgrade.

When national curriculum levels were abolished in 2015, schools were given free rein to assess in new ways. That’s not to say the government stayed silent: it set up a Commission on Assessment without Levels which included assessment luminaries such as Prof. Rob Coe and Daisy Christodoulou. That commission then wrote an influential report which did much to improve on the sector’s understanding of the purposes and principles of assessment.

However, what the report did not do is tell schools how to assess now that they no longer had levels to lean on. The report itself said that “it does not prescribe specific content, but provides questions which schools can ask to provide assurance that the policies they develop will be clear and effective.” And when it was specific, in recommending that the government should establish a national item bank of assessment questions, its recommendation was not acted upon by the government of the day.

That said, a consistent thread was that assessment should serve the curriculum. In the report’s words, “Schools should be free to develop an approach to assessment which aligns with their curriculum and works for their pupils and staff.” That’s a statement I think we can all still get behind.

And yet, I would argue two major trends have emerged since 2015 that have led us too often to a point where curriculum and assessment have become weirdly and accidentally divorced:

1. Most primaries adopted an external maths curriculum from providers such as White Rose Maths, Power Maths, Ark Curriculum+, NCETM and the Maths Hubs, or CUSP.
2. Most primaries purchased a commercial standardised assessment that did not align with their chosen curriculum.

I’m not blaming schools and I totally see how we got here! It makes a tonne of sense to purchase (and adapt, should you wish) a rigorous and well-resourced external curriculum, rather than each school writing their own. And standardised assessment suites offer the promise of objectivity and reliability, which can feel like a really useful summative overlay on top of the daily formative assessment you’re conducting with your class. 

So where’s the problem here? Well, the lack of alignment between standardised assessments and school curricula has led to some weird and problematic things happening in schools. For example:

1. We diagnose phantom gaps in learning. If you’re offering a non-curriculum-aligned standardised assessment to your class, there’s a good chance it includes questions that you haven’t taught yet. This isn’t a niche issue - when discussing this with Lauren Meadows from Unity Schools Partnership and CUSP (one of our maths partners), she cited research their MAT had done that showed that up to 40% of content in papers their schools were sitting was not related to their curriculum at that point in time. A standardised assessment vendor might not mind this - their job is to put all students in the country in a rank order, and some children will be able to answer questions on things they haven’t been taught. But if you’re a teacher administering a termly assessment, you surely want to know what it tells you about how your students are performing in the curriculum areas you’ve covered. You don’t want the assessment to imply you have a gap in multiplication and division, if the concepts it’s testing in that content domain are things you won’t cover until later in the year!
2. We put teachers and children in uncomfortable situations. What do you say to a six year old who asks you why they are being given a bunch of questions in an end-of-term assessment on something they haven’t been taught? You could say “Don’t worry, just skip those ones” (and many do), but you might then worry that your class will look bad compared to classes where the teacher encourages them to have a go. Or you could give them a bit of a helping hand (and this definitely also happens), but then of course you undermine the accuracy of your results in the other direction. Which leads to the next point. 
3. We assume reliability and validity where it does not exist. Reliability (consistency of scores across replications of a testing procedure) and Validity (does the assessment test what it intends to measure) are crucial principles of assessment. Commercial standardised assessments might look highly reliable and valid to schools. But to what extent can we really feel that way about them if they don’t align with our curriculum, particularly in a subject like maths?
4. We see progress where there is none. Let’s say you use a standardised assessment with poor curriculum alignment in the autumn term. A likely outcome is that your grades will be depressed relative to other schools who may have better curriculum alignment. However, when summer comes around, the problem will go away because the summer version will align with the national curriculum expectations for the given year, so there’s much less leeway for untaught content to be included. So you’ll be sad when you look at your data in the autumn, but jubilant in the summer, because it looks like you’ve turned things around throughout the year. In reality though, you may have stayed at similar levels - or even gone backwards relative to other schools - during that time. 
5. We treat termly tests like cumulative ones. In recent years, the prominence of cognitive science and retrieval practice has had a positive impact on teaching, but many commercially written assessments have not adapted to the times. It’s common for a termly assessment to focus mostly on content from that term or academic year only. However, if you’re a year five teacher, you also care about whether content taught in years 3 and 4 has been retained. So really you need an assessment that samples content from the entire key stage, but that’s often not what you’re getting.

The good news however, is that Smartgrade has a solution to this problem: rigorously curriculum-aligned standardised maths assessments! These are either provided by partners like Ark Curriculum+ and CUSP, who have carefully designed their own assessments; or written by our own team of assessment experts as part of our Smartgrade Assessment Series. As a consequence we can offer assessments that align with White Rose Maths / Power Maths (which follows the White Rose Maths sequencing), NCETM’s Curriculum Prioritisation, Ark Curriculum+ and CUSP. Those curricula are used by over 90% of England’s state schools so the large majority of schools can get curriculum-aligned standardised assessments via Smartgrade. We do also have a version that is curriculum-agnostic, but even in that scenario, we share our content choices with schools to ensure that they are comfortable with the level of alignment before they use them.

All our maths assessments are also cumulative, meaning that they combine current-term taught content with carefully selected content from previous terms and years. This approach provides opportunities for retrieval practice - recognising that pupils forget content unless it is revisited. It also allows schools to identify forgotten or insecure foundational knowledge and intervene before gaps impact new learning.

While the theory behind our assessments may be groundbreaking, the format is not - we have a SATs-style look and feel across the whole SAS range, along with SATs-style language in questions where appropriate, so that students become familiar with that as they progress through primary.

What’s more, Smartgrade reviews its assessments and refreshes its standardisations each year (we call this “live standardisation”), which means you never need to worry about using out-of-date tests. With the Curriculum & Assessment Review looming, this is more important than ever, as you can be assured that your assessments will evolve at the same pace as your curriculum.

To find out more about Smartgrade Assessment Series, get a quote for Smartgrade Assessment Series or book a demo with our team.