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How Cognassist is used in practice

Before you design an integration, it helps to see where Cognassist sits in your organisation's day, and, just as importantly, where it does not. Cognassist is the source of truth for inclusion: the cognitive assessment, the support agreed, and the evidence that support was delivered. It sits alongside the systems you already run: it does not replace your enrolment system, your delivery tools, or your reporting stack.

Your MIS stays the system of record, your delivery tools stay where teaching happens, and your BI stays where leaders report. Cognassist adds one thing they do not have, a cognitive assessment and the support evidence built on it, and hands that back to the systems your staff already use. The hand-offs between Cognassist and those systems are where an integration earns its keep.

For the same picture drawn as the systems in a real estate, with the data that flows at each stage, see How the systems fit together.

The operational flow at a glance

Each row below is a hand-off: name where the activity happens and who does it, then map it to the system in your estate that owns it. Terms in bold on first use are defined in the glossary; the identifiers and result codes referenced here live in Core concepts.

Stage Where it happens Who does it The API hand-off
Onboarding Your MIS / enrolment system, then Cognassist Data / enrolment team POST /v1/learners
Early support Cognassist Primary tutor, with the learner GET /v1/learners/{learnerId}/assessment
Ongoing delivery Your delivery / e-portfolio tools; evidence in Cognassist Tutors and support staff Support records
Formal assessment Your exams process Exams officer None (manual attach)
Leadership oversight Your BI tools and/or Cognassist Insights Leaders and quality staff POST /v1/learnerexports

The stages below expand each hand-off. Read the summary, and open a stage only when you are mapping that one to your estate.

Onboarding: get the learner into Cognassist

A learner is enrolled in your MIS (management information system) or enrolment system, and that record stays the system of record. To be assessed, the learner also needs to exist in Cognassist. This is the first hand-off: create the learner with POST /v1/learners, or hand a bulk file to a managed SFTP upload.

Keep the two systems joined using the identifiers described in Core concepts: store the learnerId you get back, and set your own learner id as clientReference on create so it stays the stable join key on your side. The learner then completes the cognitive assessment in Cognassist. See Create and manage learners and Send the assessment.

Early support: agree the reasonable adjustments

The result is a cognitive profile, a signal, not a diagnosis, and it leads with a learner's strengths as well as where they may need support. In Cognassist, the learner's primary tutor reviews it with the learner and agrees a support plan of reasonable adjustments (practical changes to how learning is delivered).

Who sees which learner is governed by assignment, defined once in Core concepts. To surface the profile where staff already work, read it with GET /v1/learners/{learnerId}/assessment. See Retrieve and render results.

Ongoing delivery: evidence the support as it happens

The agreed adjustments are delivered in teaching, in your delivery, VLE (virtual learning environment), or e-portfolio tools. As support is delivered, it is evidenced in Cognassist, where each record links back through its adjustment to the assessed barrier.

That end-to-end link, from profile to adjustment to evidence, is the golden thread (see Core concepts). You read that evidence via support records. See Export evidence and data.

Formal assessment: carry adjustments into exams

The same everyday adjustments a learner uses in teaching can be carried into your exams process, where many awarding organisations recognise them. Cognassist gives you the assessment result and support evidence to attach to that file. There is no automated push into any exams system; attaching the evidence is a manual step in your process.

Leadership oversight: report on identification, coverage, and impact

Leaders report in your BI (business intelligence) tools, and/or in Cognassist Insights, the admin-only in-platform dashboard. To build cohort views in your own stack, pull the data out in bulk with POST /v1/learnerexports, which delivers a full evidence payload on the 700 Learner Export Completed webhook.

Insights is a dashboard, not an API: for cohort views in your own tools, use the bulk export rather than trying to read Insights programmatically. See Export evidence and data.

The chain running through these stages, from assessed barrier to delivered support, is the golden thread: your evidence, for your own funding and audit processes, and yours to decide what you record and how you recover the cost of provision. See the golden thread for that framing.

On timing

We deliberately state no timeframes for the learner's assessment calendar, because you know your own enrolment and delivery schedule better than we do. For what the integration itself involves, and the steps to stand it up, see Before you start and the ordered Integration checklist.

Where to go next

Planned, not live today: structured support-plan and reasonable-adjustment data, plan and review webhook events, and cohort or bulk reporting endpoints. See the roadmap.