The Secretariat

Who runs the Council, and what they cannot do

The Council determines what it recommends. The Secretariat makes it happen — and is staffed by the company that funds it, which is why its limits are published here beside its mandate rather than somewhere quieter.

Offices: 3
Votes held: None
Independent seats: 13
Seats filled: 0

Status

The Council is being constituted. Its founding cohort is forming and no Council publication, roundtable or research output has yet been produced. Everything described as planned is a commitment of intent, not a record of work done.

Read this first

The count, as it stands today

Until the independent seats are filled, the only people named on this site are the Founding Chair, whose appointment has been offered and not yet accepted, and three officers employed by the funder. That is an honest description of a body that is being constituted, and it is the reason the Council publishes nothing and decides nothing while fewer than seven voting members are in office.

The Council determines the recommendations and principles. The PrepGraph-supported Secretariat enables research, coordination, publication and implementation. The Secretariat holds no vote.

The Council's named people today, by whether they hold a vote.
Independent voting seats	13	Twelve Founding Members and the Founding Chair
Of those, filled	0	The Founding Chair's appointment has been offered and not yet accepted
Secretariat officers	3	All three employed by PrepGraph
Votes held by the Secretariat	0	On publication, standards, membership or anything else
Decisions the Council may take today	0	Nothing is decided or published while fewer than seven voting members are in office

The funder's other activities

PrepGraph's activity has three parts: a commercial platform sold to schools, an internal research and development function, and this Council. The first two are commercial. This one is not, and the rules in the Charter and the independence policy are what hold the boundary.

The offices

Three offices, each published with its limits

Naming the people who run a vendor-funded council is only worth doing if what they may not do is as easy to find as what they may. Each office below carries both, and the rule that binds it hardest is set apart at the foot.

Umesh Sharma

Founder & Executive Convener

Founder & CEO, PrepGraph

Holds the founding intent and the research direction. Brings questions, evidence and funding to the Council — and is the person the Council’s independence is measured against.

What this office does

Bring emerging research and technology questions to the Council, including the ones that are inconvenient for a company selling AI to schools.
Identify where Indian schools are working without guidance, and propose what the Council might write.
Present implementation evidence from schools, with its provenance and its limitations stated, for the Council to accept, discount or reject.
Fund and organise studies under the Research Agenda, on the terms that instrument sets and no others.
Convene working groups and find people willing to do the work.
Commit PrepGraph’s funding for a full term in writing, with the amount published, before the first appointment of that term.
Translate what the Council publishes into tools a school can use, at PrepGraph’s cost and without the Council’s endorsement of any such tool.

What it may not do

Holds no vote — on publication, on standards, on membership, on a vendor question, or on anything else.
Does not count towards quorum. The Council is never quorate on the strength of its Secretariat.
Cannot approve, amend, delay or withhold a Council publication. That power sits with the Chair and a majority of the voting members.
Does not sit on the ethics review panel and takes no part in its decisions.
Is not present when the Council decides any matter in which PrepGraph has an interest, and the minutes record that he withdrew.
May propose an agenda item; the Chair may decline it without giving a reason, and both the proposal and the outcome are minuted.
Cannot remove the Founding Chair, shorten her term, or appoint her successor once the Council has voting members.

The Executive Convener may contribute research, evidence and proposals. Council recommendations are determined collectively and are not subject to commercial approval by PrepGraph.

Rekha Sharma

Executive Director & Secretary-General

Chief Operating Officer, PrepGraph

Runs the Council. Operations, governance, records, programmes and publication — the work that decides whether any of this happens at all.

What this office does

Convene meetings, circulate papers in advance, and keep minutes that record disagreement as well as agreement.
Maintain the register of members, the register of declared interests and the record of funds received, and publish them at the address of record.
Coordinate members, Expert Fellows and working groups, and keep the work programme moving between meetings.
Organise roundtables, convenings and educator programmes, and see that they are documented.
Carry Council outputs through drafting, member comment, dissent, approval and publication, free and ungated.
Manage relationships with schools, associations, academics and other bodies in the Council’s name and not in PrepGraph’s.
Track what happens to Council recommendations after publication, including where they are ignored.
Keep Council communications separate from PrepGraph product marketing, in channel, in list and in wording.

What it may not do

Holds no vote on any question. A partial bar — non-voting on "vendor-specific or standards decisions" — was considered and rejected as too weak, because it invites the argument about which decisions counted.
Cannot approve a Council document, or issue one that the Chair has not approved in writing.
Cannot decide who is invited to membership; the Chair invites the first cohort and the Founding Members assent thereafter.
Holds no commercial-relationship data about members or participants. Declared interests are received, held and published by the Reviewer of Concerns.
Cannot use a participant list, an attendee list or a contact detail for any PrepGraph commercial purpose.
Cannot amend an instrument, or the register, other than to correct a recorded error with a dated note saying what changed.

Nothing is published in the Council’s name without the Founding Chair’s written approval. The Secretariat drafts; it does not decide.

Anisha Sarkar

Director, Education Partnerships & National Outreach

Education partnerships, PrepGraph

Builds the Council’s external network — schools, principals, associations and regional convenings — and is bound by the sharpest rule in this document, because her PrepGraph work is commercially adjacent.

What this office does

Build participation: invite school leaders, work with school groups and associations, and convene regional roundtables.
Represent the Secretariat at school-network and association meetings.
Coordinate outreach for founding membership and for Expert Fellowships, on the Chair’s invitation and over the Chair’s signature.
Organise the logistics of convenings and see that a published note follows each one.
Carry the Council’s instruments to schools that will never buy anything, which is most of them.

What it may not do

May not raise, invite, accept or continue a commercial conversation about a PrepGraph product, price, pilot or contract inside a Council activity.
Where a school raises commercial interest during a Council activity, she says at that moment that the conversation moves to PrepGraph’s ordinary business channel, and the referral is minuted.
May not use a Council invitation list, attendee list or contact detail as a prospect list, or pass one to anyone who would.
Holds no vote, and does not count towards quorum.
May not present, demonstrate or describe a PrepGraph product at a Council convening, in any format, including in answer to a direct question — the answer is the referral above.

A Council roundtable that becomes a product demonstration is a breach of the independence policy, reportable to the Reviewer of Concerns like any other.

Provided for, not constituted

Working groups

Six are provided for by the Charter. None exists. They are led by Expert Fellows, and Expert Fellows are appointed by the Founding Members — so no working group can be constituted before the Council itself is.

Pillar 1 Not constituted

Responsible AI & Governance

Model policy a school can adopt, the conditions on any AI touching a child, and the vendor question set.

Responsible AI in Schools

Pillar 2 Not constituted

Teacher AI Enablement

What a teacher should be able to do, described in observable levels, and what a school owes them to get there.

Teacher AI Enablement

Pillar 3 Not constituted

Student Safety & Wellbeing

Age-appropriateness, disclosure to students, academic honesty taught rather than policed, and the harms to watch for.

Student AI Readiness

Pillar 5 Not constituted

School AI Readiness

The readiness framework, its revision from field use, and what it costs a school with no technology staff.

School Leadership & Governance

Pillar 4 Not constituted

Academic Innovation

Learning gaps, formative assessment and differentiated teaching — and honest measurement of whether any of it helped.

Academic Innovation

Pillar 6 Not constituted

Policy & Standards

How Council work meets the obligations schools already carry, and where a floor of practice is worth proposing.

Research & Evidence

How the conflict is contained

A named secretariat is a claim. The policy is the test.

Every limit on this page is written into the Founding Charter or the independence policy, and each leaves a trace a reader can check — a minute, a register entry, a published approval date. If one of them is broken, the evidence is a document, and the document is public.

Independence & conflict policy The Charter’s composition article