United Curriculum activates mid-year assessments on Smartgrade for national benchmarking

Schools across England can now access United Curriculum’s mid-year standardized assessments through Smartgrade, offering cohort benchmarking and detailed analysis to support curriculum planning.

United Curriculum took to LinkedIn to confirm that its standardized mid-year assessments are now available through the Smartgrade platform.

The organization develops curriculum-aligned resources and assessments used in schools across England, and this release marks the next phase of its assessment cycle for the academic year.

In its announcement, United Curriculum says the papers offer national benchmarking and are designed to give teachers clear insight into student performance at the midpoint of the year. “Schools can now access high-quality, standardised mid-year papers with national benchmarking, giving teachers clear insights into student progress and helping plan next steps effectively,” the team wrote.

United Curriculum assessments sit within a wider framework of subject-specific materials developed by specialist writers and experienced teachers. They can be used alongside the full curriculum package or as standalone assessments.

Expanded assessments released across core and humanities subjects

The latest set of assessments covers English, maths, science, history, geography, religious studies, and Year 10 French and Spanish. Papers are designed to sample curriculum content from the organization’s specification documents, with topics rotating year to year.

United Curriculum states that each assessment is written in accordance with industry best practice, with validity and reliability central to design. Papers include multiple-choice items, short responses, and extended written questions. Mark schemes are structured for consistency and reduce variation between teachers, with clear crediting rules and exemplars where relevant.

These assessments are sat by tens of thousands of students nationwide, forming a large dataset that enables schools to benchmark performance against a wide cohort.

Smartgrade integration provides standardized reporting and detailed analysis

Smartgrade, the assessment analysis platform founded in 2020, hosts the administration, data entry, and reporting for United Curriculum’s papers. The platform integrates with school MIS systems, allowing class and student data to populate automatically before teachers upload marks.

Once data is entered, Smartgrade generates instant formative analysis, highlighting topic-level strengths and gaps for individuals and classes. Heatmapping, question-level breakdowns, and curriculum-linked diagnostics provide detail for planning future teaching.

After the national data window closes, schools receive cohort-benchmarked percentiles that show where students sit relative to peers across England. For Year 10 modern foreign languages, percentile data is supplemented with a 9–1 indicator aligned to national GCSE grade distributions.

Schools can also generate printable reports for students that include topic feedback, question analysis, and percentile positions.

Focus on reliability, standardization, and reducing workload

United Curriculum emphasizes that its partnership with Smartgrade is intended to deliver meaningful analysis while reducing teacher workload. Assessments can be completed within standard lesson time, and the platform removes the need for manual data management or complex spreadsheets.

Smartgrade was built around the principle of live standardization, meaning cohorts are always compared against students taking the same test at the same time. This avoids reliance on historical datasets and allows adjustments for cohort shifts or external factors, such as recovery trends following the pandemic.

The organization states that reliability, transparency, and alignment with curriculum intent sit at the core of the project, with assessments designed to give actionable insight rather than broad judgement.

United Curriculum assessments were originally developed for the United Learning group but are now being made available more widely. The organization says the assessments and use of Smartgrade will be free of charge for schools this year.

United Curriculum says this approach reflects its wider mission to support high-quality teaching regardless of school context. The team stated that high-quality assessments “allow you to understand your students’ strengths, gaps and performance, with new, unseen papers twice a year.”

United Curriculum added that it aims to empower teachers with resources that support consistency without removing professional autonomy.

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