Education Agent Skills Library

An open-source library of 147 evidence-based pedagogical skills for curriculum design, lesson planning, and assessment — works in Claude Code, Claude.ai (via MCP), and OpenAI Codex, and engineered for AI agent orchestration.

[!IMPORTANT] Hosted MCP access now requires an auth token.

The library is still free and open source, and local/plugin/manual use remains the recommended free path. The hosted MCP server is still available for people who specifically need a remote MCP endpoint, but anonymous access is now blocked so the service stays sustainable.

Need hosted MCP? Request an access token or jump to hosted MCP setup.

Get Started

Works with Claude, Codex, and any tool that supports the Agent Skills standard.

For sustainable free use, install or copy the skills locally from GitHub where possible. The hosted MCP server is a convenience endpoint for remote clients, not a requirement for using the library.

Claude

CoWork (easiest) — go to Customize → (+) Add Plugin and paste:

https://github.com/GarethManning/education-agent-skills

Claude Code CLI — install from the repo URL:

claude plugin install https://github.com/GarethManning/education-agent-skills

Claude.ai / Claude Desktop (hosted MCP) — use only if your workflow specifically needs a remote MCP connector. Hosted access requires a token:

https://mcp-server-sigma-sooty.vercel.app/mcp

Request a token here: Hosted MCP access signup. Free local and manual options remain available. See Hosted MCP access.

OpenAI Codex

Codex does not need the hosted MCP server. Recommended local setup:

git clone https://github.com/GarethManning/education-agent-skills.git
cd education-agent-skills
codex plugin marketplace add "$PWD"

The repository includes a Codex plugin manifest at .codex-plugin/plugin.json pointing to ./skills/, plus a local marketplace helper at .agents/plugins/marketplace.json. After installing/enabling the local plugin, restart Codex.

For one or two individual skills, copy them into your global Codex skills directory:

mkdir -p ~/.codex/skills
cp -r skills/<domain>/<skill-name> ~/.codex/skills/

Example:

cp -r skills/memory-learning-science/spaced-practice-scheduler ~/.codex/skills/

Full Codex guide: docs/CODEX.md.

Any Agent Skills-compatible tool

Copy skill folders from skills/ into your agent's skills directory. Each skill is a folder containing SKILL.md with name/description frontmatter — no dependencies, no build step.

Manual (no setup)

1. Open any skill file in the repository (under skills/)
2. Copy the prompt block
3. Paste it into any AI and fill in the fields for your class or context

Feedback & Contributions

I'd love to hear your thoughts. If you have suggestions, find bugs, or want to contribute:

• Email: gareth.manning@gmail.com
• X: https://x.com/worldteacherman
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gareth-manning-a404b387/
• Open a Pull Request or Issue on GitHub

I'm an educator — start here No setup required. Install the plugin and start teaching.

I'm a developer or AI builder — start here YAML schemas, typed inputs and outputs, chaining metadata, live MCP server.

Who This Is For

• Classroom teachers who want evidence-based lesson and assessment design without hours of research
• University lecturers and professors who received little or no teacher training and want practical, research-grounded support for their teaching
• Curriculum designers and heads of learning building programmes, units, and assessments
• School leaders in innovative and alternative education contexts — international schools, Montessori, project-based, democratic and nature-based schools
• Innovators reimagining education — people building new school models, alternative programmes, and next-generation learning environments. Evidence-based constraints don't limit creative redesign of education; they deepen it.
• EdTech developers and AI builders who need a structured, programmatically accessible education knowledge layer
• Education researchers interested in how evidence translates into AI-mediated practice

Why This Exists

AI is arriving in education fast. Whether it improves learning outcomes or simply scales mediocre practice depends almost entirely on what it is built on.

Most AI education tools are built on convention, habit, and assumption — on what educators have always done, rather than on what the research says actually works. Learning styles. Rigid lesson structures. Wellbeing programmes disconnected from learning theory. As AI expands in education, so does the risk of scaling ineffective practice.

This library exists to build something different: a credible, rigorous foundation for AI in education. One that is anchored in named research, honest about its limitations, and designed especially for the educators working at the frontier — building the next generation of schools, not optimising existing ones.

The potential is real. Personalised, evidence-grounded learning support at a scale that was never previously possible. But only if what is powering it is the actual evidence.

The benefit is not only personalised learning. It is teaching quality and workload. An educator who would otherwise spend hours researching, designing, and second-guessing gets structured, evidence-grounded support in minutes — which means more time for the parts of teaching that only a human can do.

That is one use case. The same library can power school-wide curriculum audits, personalised professional development pathways for teachers, or orchestrated end-of-term assessment reviews. The skills are the foundation. The architecture below describes the layers that make this possible.

Try It Now

With the plugin (recommended)

Install the plugin, then tell Claude what you need in plain language. The skills activate automatically.

Example: Say "I'm planning a Year 9 science unit on cells — 6 weeks, 3 lessons a week."

Claude runs the Backwards Design Unit Planner, the Spaced Practice Scheduler, and the Retrieval Practice Generator in parallel. In under 90 seconds you get a complete lesson-by-lesson plan with spaced retrieval built in, evidence-grounded sequencing, and ready-to-use formative assessment activities — all calibrated to the timeline and topic list you provided.

Without the plugin (manual)

No API key. No technical setup. No dependencies.

1. Open any skill file in the repository (under skills/)
2. Copy the prompt block
3. Paste it into any AI and fill in the fields for your class or context

Example: Open skills/memory-learning-science/spaced-practice-scheduler/SKILL.md and provide:

• Topics: Cell structure, Cell transport, Cell division, Enzymes, Biological molecules
• Timeline: 8-week term, starting 3 February
• Lessons per week: 3

Claude returns a complete week-by-week schedule showing when to teach new content and when to revisit previous topics at expanding intervals — with specific retrieval activities for each review slot. The schedule follows Cepeda et al.'s (2006) meta-analysis on optimal spacing intervals, includes interleaving across topics, and comes with practical guidance on what to do when review reveals gaps.

What Makes This Different

Evidence is the filter — including knowing what to exclude. Every skill is grounded in named research: specific authors, specific studies, specific findings. Frameworks that lack empirical support — including learning styles, VAK, and other widely-circulated but poorly-evidenced approaches — are not included. The library documents exactly what was excluded and why in EXCLUSIONS.md. For any school or faculty trying to separate evidence from convention, that document is worth reading on its own.

Evidence strength is rated transparently.

Where original frameworks are included (Domain 14), they are labelled honestly. One important limitation: the skills encode research-grounded prompts, but the prompts themselves have not been empirically validated as AI interventions. That work is ongoing.

Built by an educator with 20 years of international school experience. The pedagogical judgements embedded in every prompt, every output structure, and every known-limitations section reflect real classroom and curriculum design practice — not a reading of the literature.

Designed for orchestration from day one. YAML schema headers, typed input and output fields, chaining metadata, and composable outputs are built into every skill. This is not a prompt collection