Smartgrade confirms curriculum-aligned assessment partnership with CUSP

Assessment platform Smartgrade has confirmed a new partnership with CUSP, after both organizations shared details of the collaboration on LinkedIn.

Smartgrade confirmed a new partnership with Curriculum with Unity Schools Partnership (CUSP), with both organizations taking to LinkedIn to outline plans to align curriculum and assessment more closely across primary and secondary education.

CUSP is a curriculum partnership working with more than 700 schools across the UK, alongside a growing number of international schools. The organization supports schools and Multi Academy Trusts through a collaborative curriculum model, bringing educators together around shared curriculum design, implementation, and review.

Its curriculum frameworks are evidence-led and structured around approaches including retrieval practice, spaced retrieval, and interleaving. CUSP’s model is also underpinned by explicit vocabulary instruction and research-informed pedagogy, with curriculum content and sequencing designed to support coherent teaching and long-term learning.

The partnership will integrate CUSP’s curriculum-aligned assessments with Smartgrade’s data and analysis platform, allowing schools to review assessment outcomes directly against curriculum intent and structure.

Partnership focuses on curriculum and assessment alignment

Sharing the news on LinkedIn, Joshua Perry, Co-founder of Smartgrade, said the partnership reflected the company’s original aim when it launched in 2020. Perry wrote, “I'm DELIGHTED that we can now announce formally our partnership with CUSP.”

He added that Smartgrade was created to give schools the opportunity to align curriculum and assessment more closely by working with established curriculum providers, describing CUSP as a strong fit across both primary and secondary settings.

Smartgrade works with schools and Multi Academy Trusts to help design, manage, and analyze internal assessment data. The platform focuses on supporting more reliable assessment design and enabling faster, clearer interpretation of results at classroom, school, and trust level.

CUSP also took to LinkedIn to explain how the partnership would operate in practice, confirming that schools using the CUSP curriculum would be able to upload and analyze assessment data through the Smartgrade platform.

The organization said schools would be able to review their data alongside results from other schools using CUSP-aligned assessments. The tools are intended to help teachers and leaders understand which elements of the curriculum are embedded securely and where further curriculum work may be required.

CUSP confirmed that the collaboration would run during its CUSP Assessments Beta year, with further marking and assessment developments expected later in the term. They wrote, “We are delighted to be partnering with the wonderful team at Smartgrade to support our ground-breaking work on assessments.”

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