In active pilot.
Running with a real pilot client. Customer name withheld until the pilot signs off and the client gives explicit consent to be named.
Education governance
Virtual Clerking — fully compliant pilot with a UK school
We're actively building a fully legally compliant Virtual Clerk for UK education governance. A pilot school is currently in testing — the system drafts, the humans sign, the audit trail holds.
The situation
Virtual Clerking is the strategic build that brought Flow Nexus AI to founding. The role of clerk to governors is the single most regulation-shaped admin job in UK education — an enormous time commitment for the people doing it, with statutory weight on every paragraph of every minute. There's a real prize for getting an AI build right here. There's an equally real risk if the design is wrong.
The pilot we're running with a UK school is the design-validation phase. Before any school commits to AI-drafted clerking at scale, the design has to demonstrate that:
- statutory drafting can be AI-led with reliably high quality;
- approval, signature, and accountability remain unambiguously human;
- the audit trail is bullet-proof for any DfE, ESFA, or trustee enquiry;
- the deployment is end-to-end compliant with the Academies Financial Handbook and DfE governance handbook.
The pilot will run through to a full review with the school's governors and external advisers. Once the design is signed off as production-ready, we move to a small first cohort of trusts.
What we built
- 01
Compliance-first design, signed off before launch
The pilot's design was walked through with the school's clerk and an external governance adviser before any code went live. Every statutory boundary — what AI may draft, what only a human may approve, who signs — is documented and signed off in writing.
- 02
AI drafts, humans approve and sign
The non-negotiable architectural choice. Statutory minutes are legally significant under the Academies Financial Handbook and DfE governance handbook. Our system never signs anything. It drafts agendas, transcribes meetings, drafts minutes, flags compliance reminders. The clerk reads, edits, and signs — exactly as today.
- 03
Audit trail built for inspectors
Every AI decision is logged with the input, the output, the reviewer, the timestamp, and the human approval. If a future inspection asks who approved what, when, and on whose authority, the answer is one query away.
- 04
Compliance reminder service
Term-of-office expiries, DBS check renewals, declaration of interest updates, attendance thresholds. The system reminds the clerk before each deadline. It never silently misses.
What's running today
What it does
1 school
in active pilot — pilot data, not full-deployment metrics
AI drafts. Humans sign.
the architectural commitment that keeps the build inside statutory boundaries
Audit-trail first
every approval logged with reviewer, timestamp, and authority
“We built this for governance teams who can't afford a single moment of ambiguity about who signed what. The pilot is teaching us where the AI is genuinely helpful — agendas, drafts, deadline tracking — and where the value of a human clerk is irreplaceable. The lines we drew at the start are the lines we'll honour at scale.”
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