Questions, answered plainly

A result published without its method is an assertion with a number attached, and a reader has no way to separate that from a well-designed study except by trusting us. Where a finding is worth defending it belongs in a document carrying its method, its sample, and the conditions under which it would have come out otherwise. That route runs through the Council’s research instrument rather than through this site, and the instrument is a founding draft, published on 29 August 2026 and open for comment. The Council has no members, no ethics review panel has been appointed, and no study has begun under it, so the route is a commitment we have made and not a thing a reader can use today.

The policy is asymmetric on purpose, and the asymmetry is the half that costs us. A finding that a direction is wrong will be published; a finding that it is right will not be claimed. When a falsifier on this site is settled, its outcome appears here as a bare direction, abandoned or revised or sustained, with the date it changed and nothing else, whether or not a full study ever follows. A reader can watch a direction die on this page, which is what makes the falsifiers below load-bearing rather than decorative.

PrepGraph is a company, this site is funded by it, and the company sells software to schools. Saying otherwise would be the first dishonest sentence here.

What separates this from marketing is not our intention but a property you can check: whether anything on the page could be argued against, and whether the page anywhere says something that costs us. Judge it on that. If a section contains no position a competent, sceptical school leader could reject, that section has failed, and we would rather be told than not.

Two reasons, and only one of them is competitive. The other is that a mechanism described loosely becomes a claim we cannot support. Naming a technique tells a reader nothing about whether it survives a section of fifty, a syllabus that must be finished by March, and a teacher with four minutes between periods.

A method stated properly arrives with its assumptions and its failure modes, and we have chosen not to publish half of one. The cost falls on you: you must judge this work on whether the problems are stated correctly, which is harder for us to fake than a diagram would be, and harder for you to check.

The word earns its place only if the work can fail, so hold us to one test, which is the whole of our answer. Every direction on this site states the condition under which we would abandon it, and when that condition is put to the test the outcome is reported here, with its date, including the outcome that ends the direction. A direction carrying no such condition, or one whose condition is never reported on, has become an essay, and a reader is entitled to withdraw the word from it.

No. Nothing here has been through external review, and no peer-reviewed publication is claimed. The record to date is empty, which is worth stating plainly, because a company can hold positions for years without ever submitting one to a party able to reject it.

Where a study is worth publishing it would go through the Council’s research instrument, with its method attached, which is slower than posting a page and is meant to be. That instrument is a founding draft, published on 29 August 2026 and open for comment; the Council has no members and no ethics review panel has been appointed, so no study can be cleared under it yet and none has begun. Until something comes out that way, treat this as stated position rather than evidence, and discount it accordingly.

Mostly in where the difficulty is thought to lie. The common claim treats personalisation as a delivery problem, as though the hard part were getting the right material in front of the right student and the knowing were already solved. We think the difficulty is in knowing what a student understands, and that what is done with that knowledge afterwards is the easier half. The argument for that, and the argument about what the mark can and cannot carry, is made in full on the position page rather than restated here.

It is also worth saying that the state is not absent from this problem, which a page like this can imply by never mentioning it. National assessment surveys, the competency-based direction in national policy, reform of board question papers and continuous assessment inside schools are all attempts at the same input. Our position is not that they do not exist but that they arrive at the wrong grain and the wrong moment for a teacher: a survey reports on a system, a reformed paper reports on a year, and the decision that matters is taken on a Monday morning about the children who did not follow Friday’s lesson. That is a position someone in policy can disagree with, and if the gap closes from the public side this work is redundant.

PrepGraph convened the Council and funds it. That is a conflict of interest, and stating it is the minimum rather than a defence. The Council is voluntary and non-statutory, it certifies nothing, and it endorses no vendor, PrepGraph included, so it cannot appear as a badge on our products.

Whether it is independent in practice cannot be settled in a paragraph. It is visible only in whether it ever publishes something inconvenient to the company paying for it. The Council dates from 29 August 2026, has no members yet and has published no findings, so that record does not exist and cannot be pointed at.

No. No study has been conducted on any child’s data, from this site or anywhere else in the company, and none has begun. What follows is a commitment rather than a description of something already running: anything involving students will be registered and cleared under the Council’s research instrument before it begins; a school is told in writing what is being asked and what it will cost in pupil, teacher and instructional hours before it agrees to anything; and a school can withdraw.

The instrument is a founding draft, published on 29 August 2026 and open for comment. The Council has no members and no ethics review panel has been appointed, so there is at present no body that could clear a study, and until there is, no work involving students is being taken on. It is not a protection a school can rely on today. Separately, and it is a separate thing, the terms on which the commercial platform holds a school’s data are set by the contract a school signs with PrepGraph. That contract is the document that binds us there, and it is not a research authorisation.

A direction that cannot fail is not research, so each one carries a condition under which we would abandon it. These are the general ones. The specific falsifier belongs with the direction it applies to, and a direction that arrives without one should be read as opinion. When one of these is settled, its outcome is reported here with its date, on the terms set out in the first answer on this page, including where the outcome is that we were wrong.

The unit of interest is a teacher’s decision, not a teacher’s performance. A system that displaces the teacher’s judgement also degrades the measurement, because the teacher is the only party who sees the student in the room and can tell a gap in understanding from a bad morning.

An account detailed enough to be useful to a teacher can also be aggregated into a ranking of teachers by whoever holds it, whatever it was built for, and a stated intention is not a safeguard against that. A school should ask any supplier, in writing and before signing, whether teacher-level aggregation of such an account is prohibited by the contract, who inside the school would be able to produce it, and what happens to that ability when the head of school changes. An answer that describes only what the supplier intends should be read as a no.

Intelligence in the institutional sense, as in an intelligence function: the standing account an organisation holds of its own situation, current enough to act on. It is not a claim about students’ intellect, and nothing here ranks anyone as more or less intelligent.

The distinction that matters is between knowing that a student scored sixty-two in a unit test and knowing which idea is missing and what should happen in the next lesson. Whether the useful unit is the student, the topic, or something narrower again is an open question, and we do not treat it as settled. A term whose unit of analysis is unsettled is a research position and nothing more, which is the only thing academic intelligence is claimed to be here.

The constraints are not the setting, they are the research. Sections of forty to sixty, a syllabus that must be completed before a board examination, shared devices, an attainment spread inside one room that would be treated as several classes elsewhere, and a medium of instruction that is often a second language at home.

A method that assumes one device per child, unbounded time and a common first language is not a method here; it is a method somewhere else that someone would have to argue is portable. We have not conducted a systematic review of the published evidence on AI and learning, and do not offer one here, so we make no claim about what the bulk of it shows or where it was gathered. What we do hold is that portability is an empirical claim rather than a background assumption, and that it cuts both ways: nothing developed here should be assumed to travel outward either.

altme.org is a separate initiative and is described on its own terms there rather than summarised here. The asymmetry is deliberate and follows from what each thing is for. Work that asks the public to inspect, adopt or participate in it owes openness as the price of asking. Work that sits inside a commercial product has two honest options, to publish a method properly with its evidence or to describe nothing at all, and we have taken the second here. The middle option, describing a mechanism impressively without exposing it to test, is the one that produces the material everybody complains about.

School leaders deciding whether any of this deserves their attention, teachers who want to see what is being claimed on their behalf before it arrives in their classroom, and researchers and policy people who will judge the framing rather than the software. It is also for our own staff, who should be able to point at a sentence here and say it is wrong.

It is not for buyers. The commercial platform is at prepgraph.com, the teacher programme at academy.prepgraph.com, and the school and partner portal at partners.prepgraph.com.

Yes, with conditions worth stating before anyone gets enthusiastic. The most useful thing a school brings is not access but constraint: the question that keeps recurring in a staffroom, the thing that fails in the second week of every new system, the reason last year’s initiative was quietly dropped. That conversation is open now. Anything that would touch a student is not, and the reason is in the second item below.

Use the contact route on this site for research correspondence. Council matters go to the Council directly at council.prepgraph.com, where the research instrument is published as a founding draft and open for comment. The Council has no members and no secretariat yet, so a question of scope put to it may go unanswered until it has one; that is the position today rather than a routing preference.

A message that names the constraint you are working under, the size of the class, and the decision you are trying to make will get a more useful reply than a general enquiry. Two requests we will answer badly, and would rather say so now: how something is built, and how well it performs.