Before starting Smartgrade I ran a schools data platform called Assembly. We were focused on building the best Multi Academy Trust (MAT) analytics tool in the country, and our goal was to make it easy to interrogate school data in a clear and visual way. In many ways we did well: our tool was popular and we had plenty of demand.

However, a nagging anxiety gnawed away at me as we grew: we had no way of helping schools with data reliability. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the sector was at risk of using clever visualisations and complex calculations to make schools believe in fundamentally dodgy data. The problem was compounded by the fact that many of the input systems that schools use for their data — such as the MIS, for example — can be incredibly clunky for data entry. So even if the analysis was quick and easy, the workload for teachers and administrators to input the data could still be horrific.

The biggest problems with school data reliability relate to assessment data. Here’s a summary of the main issues:

1. Lots of internal assessment systems remain grounded in teacher judgment.

There are some good reasons for this — it’s a non-trivial task to put in place high quality tests for summative assessment purposes. Nonetheless, if you can assess based on well-designed questions, you probably should. Teacher judgments are subjective, so prone to vagueness and bias. Moreover, teacher judgments require you to mark against a rubric, and that’s hard. As Daisy Christodoulou points out in her excellent blog Why Is Teacher Assessment Biased?, gathering evidence to cross-reference with level descriptors “is at the limits of human cognitive capacity”.

2. Standardised assessments are expensive and limited in scope.

One solution to point (1) could be to buy in standardised assessments, but these can be costly, and the available options mostly focus on English and Maths. That may serve a purposes in some limited circumstances, but if you’re a secondary school trying to put in place an assessment system across all subjects, it won’t get you very far. And even where tests do exist, there’s no guarantee that they’ll match your preferred curriculum and progression model.

3. It’s hard to write a good assessment.

Schools and MATs who understand points (1) and (2) often end up writing their own assessments, but that throws up its own challenges. First, teachers are trained to be great teachers; not to be assessment authors, and there are plenty of subtle skills involved in writing a great assessment. Second, even once teachers have mastered the art of writing a test paper, there haven’t been any tools available to help them evaluate its reliability.

Smartgrade’s mission is to upgrade the quality of internal assessment across the sector by solving these problems. Our system is designed for MATs specifically, because we think we’ve found a way for MATs to use their scale to make more reliable assessments.

‍

Here’s how we’re doing it.

We give you feedback on assessment quality

Every assessment created within Smartgrade has an associated Quality Report, which tells you things like the inherent reliability of the assessment, by looking at things like the internal consistency of questions in relation to each other. These are the kinds of techniques that exam boards and academics have used for years; now, for the first time, we’re making them available to groups of schools. (See screenshot above.)

We help you standardise your own assessments.

Smartgrade is the first assessment tool to help a MAT to standardise their own assessments. Teachers enter raw scores into our easy-to-use markbook, and we help a MAT to standardise the results and set grade boundaries using intuitive tools. And because MATs increasingly have common curricula and chunky cohorts — often 1,000+ students in a given year — by working with MATs we can create sample sizes that stand up to the standardisation process.

We prioritise ease-of-use.

We believe that minimising teacher workload should be a central design principle of any assessment system. For that reason, we’ve made it super-simple to create assessment templates and roll them out to any school within a MAT. We’ve built Smartgrade to have MIS integration by default, working with the pros at Wonde. And crucially, we’ve spent months piloting and iterating our markbook so that it is super-simple and fail-safe to use. For example, grades auto-save as you enter them, so you’ll never lose a single mark because of a browser issue (See screenshot below).

We’re working with the experts at Evidence Based Education (EBE).

Assessment is complicated. The whole Smartgrade team has a background in the education sector — but we think doing assessment well calls for super-deep expertise. That’s why we’ve paired up with the specialists at EBE. They’re particularly central to the evolution of the Quality Checker, which is based on algorithms and approaches they’ve developed over many years. A number of our early-adopter MATs also work with them directly, benefitting from their range of high-quality and cost-effective training courses (e.g. Assessment Essentials and the Assessment Lead Programme).

We partner closely with our customers.

We’ve been building Smartgrade for over a year now, working very closely with our early adopter MATs. We’ve held off from launching the product until we were comfortable that it met the needs of this demanding-and-supportive audience. What’s more, we’ll keep iterating the system to meet our customers’ needs: there’s plenty of room for further innovation and enhanced features.

‍

So that’s who we are. If you’d like to talk to us about how to make summative assessment easier AND more reliable at your MAT, please do get in touch. Our team has experience of writing and advising on assessment policies in MATs of all different shapes and sizes, so even if you’d just like to chew the fat on this complex subject, we’ll want to hear from you!