Press & media

Because PrepGraph pays for it, and concealing that would be worse. A neutral-sounding name with the same funder behind it reads as independent when it is not. The name is a disclosure, and a disclosure is not a safeguard. The safeguards are the things to examine, and they are published: the Chair and members are unpaid and are not PrepGraph employees; PrepGraph cannot remove the Chair or end her term, and removal is a power of the voting members alone; the Council endorses no vendor, PrepGraph included; membership obliges no one to buy anything; PrepGraph has no editorial review and gets one ten-working-day factual-accuracy pass on statements about its own systems, logged and published with the output; and any study PrepGraph takes part in says so in the publication. The standing rules, the Chair's declaration of interests, the funding disclosure and the register of use are published at council.prepgraph.com.

PrepGraph is a commercial company and the Council raises its profile. We do not pretend otherwise. What the Council will not do is rate, recommend or shortlist products, ours included; pass member details to a sales team; or treat membership as a lead. The test is written into the rules: any Council output must be useful to a school that buys nothing from anyone. Any member may object in writing to a draft, and if it is published over the objection the objection is published with it. That is the mechanism you can check; the intention is not. Be clear about the date, though: there are no members yet, so that control does not operate until the first members accept, and the Council should not be treated as independently checked before then.

Nothing yet. PrepGraph established it and appointed its Founding Chair on the date of her acceptance. It has no members, no events, no reports and no findings, and under its own Charter it is not constituted until seven voting members are in office. The documents published with this announcement are founding instruments issued before that point: founding drafts, on the secretariat's drafting, open for comment, and to be reaffirmed, amended or withdrawn by the voting members once seven are in office, and in any case by 31 August 2027. The first-year programme will be settled by the Chair with the founding members and published when it is adopted. We would rather say that plainly than dress up a launch.

None. The Council is a voluntary, non-statutory initiative. It is not a government, regulatory or accrediting body, and it does not certify, rate or approve schools, curricula or products. We refer to public policy documents such as NEP 2020 and the DPDP Act 2023 only as the context schools already work within. No authority has endorsed the Council, we have sought no such endorsement, and we will correct anyone who reports otherwise.

Appointment by the funder is a real limit and we name it rather than argue with it. The controls are these: the office is unpaid, so there is no income to withdraw; her declaration of interests is published at council.prepgraph.com and records no employment, shareholding or paid consultancy with PrepGraph, which is a document you can read rather than an assurance we give; PrepGraph cannot remove her or shorten her term, and cannot take part in any removal, which is a power of two thirds of the voting members on stated grounds; nothing is published in her name without her written approval; anything she asks to be withdrawn is withdrawn; and she may resign publicly and state her reasons, with no confidentiality undertaking sought and no contest from PrepGraph. Independence here is a set of exits, not a claim about character.

Four people are named and three of them are employed by PrepGraph. Umesh Sharma is Founder & Executive Convener and is Founder & CEO, PrepGraph. Rekha Sharma is Executive Director & Secretary-General and is Chief Operating Officer, PrepGraph. Anisha Sarkar is Director, Education Partnerships & National Outreach, and works on education partnerships at PrepGraph. The fourth is Ms. Sri Lakshmi, the Founding Chair, who is not a PrepGraph employee. We publish that ratio on the Council's own page rather than leave a reader to discover it, and we would rather be asked this question than have it asked for us. But it is a description of the Secretariat, not of the Council. The three are Secretariat officers and not members: none of them holds a vote, on publication, on standards, on membership, on a vendor question or on anything else; none counts towards quorum, so the Council is never quorate on the strength of the people who pay for it; and the Charter separately bars anyone deriving material income from a supplier of AI products to schools from holding office or voting at all. The Council determines the recommendations and principles. The PrepGraph-supported Secretariat enables research, coordination, publication and implementation. The Secretariat holds no vote. The Executive Convener may contribute research, evidence and proposals. Council recommendations are determined collectively and are not subject to commercial approval by PrepGraph. As to why it should be taken seriously today, the honest answer is that on its own it should not be: the twelve Founding Member seats are vacant, the Chair's appointment has been offered and not accepted, and under the Charter the Council is constituted only when seven voting members are in office and publishes nothing and decides nothing until then. Judge it when the seven are in office. If they never are, the correct reading is that this stayed a funder's secretariat and never became a council, and the seats are published as vacant so that reading stays available to you.

Not as the Council's independent finding, and not at all where the product is PrepGraph's own. The Council does not publish an evaluation of a PrepGraph product funded by PrepGraph, and where the intervention studied is the convener's product the study is an evaluation of that product whatever it is titled. PrepGraph may otherwise act as a research partner and may contribute data or platform access to a study. Where it does, the question and method are published before the data is analysed, the participation is disclosed prominently in the publication, and null or negative results are published on the same terms as positive ones. PrepGraph has no editorial review of any of it: it receives one written factual-accuracy pass on statements about its own systems, of ten working days, after which silence publishes, and every comment it makes and every change that follows is logged and published with the output. If a study is abandoned, that is recorded too. A vendor's product evidence dressed as a council's finding is precisely the practice this Council exists to argue against.