Built an AI co-pilot that raised the standard of school governance oversight

I'm a school governor at Denbury Primary, a 93-pupil state primary school in Devon. I'm Co-Chair, and the lead governor for safeguarding and staffing. In England, school governors are unpaid volunteers who hold a school's leaders to account for how well it's run, and make the strategic decisions that achieve the best outcomes for its children. It's a serious role with real consequences, and it's easy to do thinly when time is short.

Strickland has a bit of history. It first appeared in an earlier form off the back of Mindvalley's Amplify with AI course, as a custom GPT in ChatGPT. The method was to use deep research to identify the leading school-governance guides in the UK, then write a single master reference document capturing their best practice, so that whenever I needed to examine a part of school life I had a sound, trustworthy reference to work from. When I moved on to AI Mastery and across to Claude, I took that master reference and developed it into the Strickland skill as it is now, building in the safeguards that keep its guidance current. I've since extended it to run a formal governance self-evaluation and to check the school's website against the statutory publication rules, and folded in the school's own style guidelines. The same principles, applied to get real results.

As it stands, Strickland is a co-pilot that turns my governance duties into clear meeting agendas, challenge questions, visit notes and checklists, aligned to what an English state school is actually required to do.

Achievements

•    A working governance co-pilot with the school's context built in, covering the full year: agendas, scrutiny of minutes, safeguarding and staffing duties, inspection preparation, finance, risk and policies.

•    Sharper challenge. It helps me ask better, evidence-seeking questions of the school's leaders, which speaks directly to the one governance weakness our last inspection flagged, that governors were not monitoring some areas in enough detail.

•    Extended into companion tools built on the same reference base: a formal governance self-evaluation against the national competency framework, and a check of the school's website against the statutory publication requirements.

•    Safeguarding and staffing oversight done to a consistent standard rather than off the cuff, within the time a volunteer genuinely has.

•    A saving for the school. First-line questions a governing board would once have paid an external adviser to answer can often be worked through with Strickland instead. It doesn't remove the need for professional advice on genuinely complex or high-risk matters, but it reduces how often we reach for it. With almost every school in the country running on a tight budget, even a few hundred or a few thousand pounds saved is money kept for the children.

Tools: Claude skills (with the school's context and a set of quick-command workflows built in), web search for live guidance checks, and Microsoft 365.

Methodology: Two safeguards make it trustworthy. First, a guidance-freshness check: whenever it relies on named statutory guidance, it tells me the source and its date, searches the web to confirm that version is still current, and reports back, so I never act on out-of-date rules. Second, a data rule pitched at the higher bar a school demands. Schools hold especially sensitive personal information about children and staff, so any drafting uses placeholders only, never real names or identifying detail, keeping that data out of the tool entirely. Throughout, it keeps strategic governance separate from day-to-day management, which is the line governors are not supposed to cross.

Learnings: In a sensitive area like this, the implementation detail is the whole point. The currency check and the data discipline are what make it safe to use at all. And the value here isn't speed, it's quality: a time-poor volunteer asking sharper questions and monitoring more thoroughly. Getting the reference base right first is also what let one assistant grow into several.

Direction of travel: Continuing to refine it and keep its guidance current, and applying the same approach, a solid reference base first and tools layered on top, to more of the governance year. The wider goal is a way of governing that raises the standard of oversight, which in the end is about the best outcomes for the children.