PrepGraph Council for Responsible AI & School Innovation – India
AI arrived in Indian schools through children's phones — not through a circular, a staff meeting or a budget line. The Council exists to write down what good practice looks like, to test the claims schools are being sold, and to build Indian evidence on what this technology actually does to learning.
PrepGraph's commitment to responsible AI in Indian schools: a Charter, ten Principles and a Readiness Framework any school can use, free, and an independent Founding Chair.
The situation
AI arrived in Indian schools through children's phones. It did not arrive through a circular, a board directive, a staff meeting or a budget line. By the time most schools formed a view of it, it was already in use: in holiday homework, in project files, in Class 10 answer practice, in the essay that reads a little too evenly. The technology entered through the student, and the institution is still catching up with a decision it never made.
This is not a crisis. It is harder to correct than a crisis, because it is an unattended default. Teachers improvise, and improvise differently. One section's teacher treats any AI use as cheating; the teacher of the next section builds a worksheet with it on Sunday and does not mention it in the staff room. Principals sit through demonstrations they have no means to test, are quoted improvement figures measured in classrooms unlike theirs, and are asked to decide in a term when the timetable, the board results and the admissions cycle all have a prior claim on their attention. Parents, who will in time hold the strongest opinions of all, have been told almost nothing by anyone.
Beneath this sit a vocabulary problem and an evidence problem. Adaptive, personalised, AI tutor and learning outcomes mean whatever the speaker intends them to mean, so two principals comparing notes are often not comparing the same thing. And little of the evidence in circulation was gathered in an Indian classroom: not in a section of fifty-five, not under board examination pressure, not where the device is shared, the medium of instruction is the second language at home, and the syllabus must still be finished by January. There is no agreed floor. No minimum practice a parent can expect from any school, and nothing a principal can point to and say, this is what we do here, and this is why.
That is the account the Council starts from, and its research strand exists to test it. The Council asks schools to demand a denominator behind any number put in front of them, and it holds its own argument to the same standard.
In the staff room
Two teachers of the same subject hold opposite rules on AI use in submitted work, and neither has been told which rule is the school's.
In the correction pile
A teacher is fairly certain a submission was machine-written, has no way to establish it, and no policy that says what happens next.
In the principal's office
A vendor quotes an improvement figure. There is no practical way to ask where it was measured, on whom, over how long, and against what comparison.
At the school gate
A parent asks whether the school uses AI. An honest answer takes ten minutes, and the school does not have one written down.
In the staff development plan
AI training, where it happened at all, was a single session on writing prompts. Nothing on assessment integrity, data, age-appropriateness, or when not to use it.
The argument
Three kinds of body already speak to schools about AI, and each is structurally unable to do this particular job. A vendor may publish a standard, but a standard written by a vendor is in the end a description of its own product, and schools discount it correctly. A circular can set a rule, but it arrives after the practice has already formed, applies uniformly to unlike schools, and states what is prohibited rather than what is good; it also cannot be argued with, which is what a school most needs to do while it is still deciding. A training programme can change one teacher, which matters, but it leaves no institutional artefact behind: when the teacher transfers, the capability transfers with her.
A convening body can do four things that none of those can. Hold a room in which principals say to one another what none of them will say from a stage. Settle vocabulary, so that a claim becomes comparable between two schools. Write a floor of practice with no commercial interest in the answer, and place the reasoning in public where it can be attacked. And frame research questions that no single school can afford to answer alone and no vendor can be trusted to mark its own answer to.
The argument for doing this now is not momentum. It is that defaults harden. The AI policies Indian schools write this session will be copied, adapted and inherited for years, and most will be written in a hurry, after an incident or before an inspection. A floor of practice will exist within a few years either way. The open question is whether it is set by people who have run a school, or by procurement pressure and the first serious incident involving a child.
Areas of work
They are not themes for a conference programme. Each exists because a school has a decision to make under it, and each is written to end in the question the decision actually turns on.
Privacy, bias, transparency, age-appropriate use, human oversight, academic integrity, child safety — and the discipline of deciding what not to deploy at all.
What must be in place before a single child uses an AI tool in this school’s name?
What a teacher should understand about how these systems work and where they fail, and what productive use looks like in preparation, feedback and assessment design.
What should a teacher here be able to do with AI by the end of this year, and how would we know that she can?
Not the ability to prompt a chatbot, which students already have and were never taught. The ability to judge: to notice when an answer is fluent and wrong.
What must a student be able to judge about a machine’s answer, and at which stage do we teach it?
Learning gaps found early, formative assessment that informs teaching, differentiated work, personalised practice — where they are genuinely better rather than merely newer.
Which teaching problem here is worth pointing this technology at first, and what result would count as a real improvement?
Adoption is a governance decision before it is an academic one. Most of governance is the capacity to say no with reasons, in a season when saying yes is easier.
What should this school adopt, what should it refuse, and what must be answered before anything is signed?
An Indian evidence base, gathered under Indian conditions, published with its method attached. Negative and null results are part of the record.
Is there Indian classroom evidence for the claim in front of me, and if not, what would it take to produce it?
Pillar 6 · Research
The test of every output is whether a school that buys nothing from anyone can use it.
Most of what Indian schools are told about AI and learning is enthusiasm with a number attached. The number is often real and almost always measured somewhere else: a different class size, a different language of instruction, a different assessment culture, a different level of device access, frequently a different country, and usually by a party with a commercial interest in the outcome. A principal cannot responsibly act on that, and is right to hold back.
The Council adopts the opposite discipline as a rule of publication, so that it can be checked rather than believed. Research questions and the measure of success are published before data are collected, with the date visible, so that a flattering question cannot be chosen afterwards. Method is published with the finding, in enough detail for a reader to disagree with it. Sample size, comparison group and effect size are reported plainly, including when they are small. Studies are conducted in Indian classrooms with the real constraints named rather than controlled away. Research involving children is held to explicit consent, data minimisation and handling consistent with the Digital Personal Data Protection Act 2023, with the school's own ethical judgement treated as binding and its withdrawal effective at any point. Everything is published free to any school, member or not.
This includes the inconvenient results. A finding that a tool made no measurable difference, or a difference too small to justify its cost, its risk or the teacher time it consumed, is published on the same terms as a favourable one. That is the purpose of the strand, not an exception to it.
Where PrepGraph acts as a research partner and contributes data, funding or platform access to a study, the participation is disclosed at the head of the published work, together with what PrepGraph supplied and what it could and could not see; and the method is reviewed before publication by a member with no relationship with PrepGraph, who is named in the publication. PrepGraph's own product evidence is not a Council finding and is never presented as one.
Year one
The founding instruments are published on this site. The Council's programme builds on them with open resources a school can adopt and adapt, each published free to any school, whether or not it has any connection to the Council, in a form meant to be edited by the school rather than adopted unchanged. Members see each draft before publication, so that they can correct it or record their dissent.
A school policy in adoptable form: permitted use, prohibited use, disclosure of AI assistance in submitted work, staff use, data rules, and a review clause with a date on it. Written to be amended by a school, not signed as it stands.
The questions a school should be able to ask before signing anything: where the claim was measured and on whom, what data leaves the school and where it goes, what happens to that data at exit, who is accountable when an output is wrong, and what the tool costs in teacher time as well as in fees. It names no products.
What a teacher should be able to do, described in observable levels, so that a school can plan development and recognise progress instead of counting attendance at a workshop.
Age-appropriate expectations for middle and senior school, framed around judgement, verification and academic honesty rather than tool operation.
A plain-language note a school can adapt and send home: what the school does with AI, what it does not do, what it asks of families, and whom a parent should contact with a concern.
A discussion paper on AI readiness in Indian schools, distinguishing plainly between what has been observed, what is inferred and what remains open.
Closed-door roundtables for school leaders, with a public note of what was concluded, and public sessions in which drafts are argued rather than presented.
Independence
PrepGraph is an AI learning company, working in India and the United States, from school to first job. It sells learning software to students, families and schools, and runs a research programme on how learners remember and build skills. It founded the Council, funds it and provides its secretariat, and the Council carries PrepGraph's name because the connection should be stated plainly.
The secretariat's offices are held by named people: Umesh Sharma, Founder & Executive Convener, who is Founder & CEO of PrepGraph; Rekha Sharma, Executive Director & Secretary-General, who is PrepGraph's Chief Operating Officer; and Anisha Sarkar, Director, Education Partnerships & National Outreach, who works on education partnerships at PrepGraph. The line between the Council and the secretariat is stated in one sentence, quoted wherever the two are described together: "The Council determines the recommendations and principles. The PrepGraph-supported Secretariat enables research, coordination, publication and implementation. The Secretariat holds no vote."
The funder's other activities are described here only so far as they bear on that boundary, and without naming a product or linking to one: "PrepGraph's activity has three parts: learning software sold to students, families and schools, from school to first job; 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."
What follows are the rules that hold it. Each is a rule with a mechanism, not an assurance.
Approval sits with the Chair, not the funder
The secretariat drafts. Nothing is published under the Council's name without the Founding Chair's written approval, and PrepGraph cannot publish, amend or withdraw a Council document on its own.
The secretariat holds no vote
None of the three officers holds a vote on publication, on standards, on membership, on a vendor question or on anything else; none counts towards quorum; and none sits on the ethics review panel. The Executive Convener withdraws when the Council decides any matter in which PrepGraph has an interest.
No editorial control for the funder
PrepGraph has no editorial review. It may correct factual statements about its own systems, and it cannot delay, amend or withhold anything the Council publishes.
No product is named
No Council instrument or guidance names a commercial product, PrepGraph included, outside a research study of which that product is the object.
No vendor money
The Council takes no sponsorship, advertising, exhibition, stall or speaking payment from any technology company, including firms competing with PrepGraph.
An independent Chair
The office is held on the condition that its holder has no shareholding, employment, commission, consultancy or procurement relationship with PrepGraph and takes no fee for the role. If the condition ceases to be met, the Chair stands down and the reason is published.
Dissent is printed, not managed
Any member may require that a dissenting note of up to three hundred words appear in the published document, under their name if they wish, unedited except for length and law.
A stated failure condition
If the Council is used to recommend a purchase, it has failed at the thing it was made for. Members are asked to say so publicly, and the Council carries any such statement on its own page, unedited.
Limits accepted at founding
Each of the following is a limit the Council accepts on itself, and each can be checked by reading its published work rather than by trusting its intentions.
The neutrality position is a standing rule and appears in the same words on every Council document: "The Council does not endorse individual procurement decisions or technology vendors. Its role is to advance responsible AI readiness, educator capability and evidence-based innovation in schools."
An invitation
If you lead a school, what the Council asks of you is your judgement and a modest amount of your time. Not a purchase. Not a pilot. Not access to your students or their data. Not your name against a claim you have not tested, and not a public position you would be uncomfortable defending in your own staff room.
Status
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.
Neutrality
The Council does not endorse individual procurement decisions or technology vendors. Its role is to advance responsible AI readiness, educator capability and evidence-based innovation in schools.
