I build the thing, run the thing, and write down how.

Where this comes from

I am a serving chair of governors at a primary school and was previously on a school senior leadership team. Governance in most schools ran on papers, memory and whoever knew where the last pack lived. SGAF is the practical response: audits, risks, visit plans and the annual statement on one connected record, so the board does the governance once and the evidence is created as it goes.

I could not afford the staff an edtech company normally carries. So I built the departments as agents instead, each with one written job, behind one front door, with gates between them and a person at every decision that matters. That operating model is what most of this site is about.

What I write about

• How a one-person company competes with suppliers that price in headcount.
• Organising agents: one front door, specialists with anti-jobs, and the cull when they sprawl.
• Adversarial gates: fact-checking, brand rules as code, proof before done, independent review.
• Tools I had to build because nothing off the shelf knew what the business knows.
• Side projects, and what play teaches that work cannot.
• What went wrong, in enough detail to be useful.

Rules I write by

First person, UK English, short paragraphs. No hype and no em dashes. Every statistic has a source or it is not there. No names of customers, schools or the platforms I use, because the point is the method, not the vendor.

Also made here

Locket, a daily puzzle. Free-SchoolAI, a free prompt library for school staff. NetCall (opens in a new tab), a courtside netball app built for my wife, who umpires netball. And the workshop, on how all of these were built. The tools behind them are on the stack page.

Get in touch

If you are a founder, a trust leader or a team working out what AI should do in your organisation and what it must not, I would like to hear from you. The quickest routes are below. Every reply comes from me, not a bot.