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Education Agent Skills (Gareth Manning) — source summary

A 165-skill pedagogy skill pack on the agentskills.io standard, by Gareth Manning (CC BY-SA 4.0; 545 stars, 91 forks; created 2026-03-01, last pushed 2026-08-04). Delivered via Telegram, routed 2026-08-05. As with cybersecurity-skills and agentic-seo-skill, the domain is not why it is here — but unlike those, this one changes something about the form.

What it is

165 SKILL.md files across 20 domains, counted from the repository tree rather than the README: original-frameworks 17, ai-learning-science 14, curriculum-assessment 13, student-learning 13, wellbeing-motivation-agency 12, down to inclusive-design 3. It ships as a cross-vendor plugin — .claude-plugin/, .codex-plugin/ and .agents/plugins/ marketplace manifests, a CI validation workflow, and a hosted MCP server with OAuth (mcp-server/) so Claude.ai can reach the skills without a local install. Targets named in the README: Claude Code, Claude.ai via MCP, OpenAI Codex, and Hermes.

Why it’s interesting here

Skills that cite their evidence. This is the new thing. Each skill’s frontmatter carries evidence_strength and a list of evidence_sources naming real literature. From adaptive-hint-sequence-designer:

evidence_strength: "strong"
evidence_sources:
  - "VanLehn (2011) — The relative effectiveness of human tutoring, intelligent tutoring
     systems, and other tutoring systems (meta-analysis, effect size 0.76)"
  - "Shute (2008) — Focus on formative feedback"

Every other pack the wiki holds asserts its own quality and stops there — the benchmark gap named in Open questions. This does not close that gap: nobody has measured whether the skill works, and a citation behind the technique is not evidence for the prompt that encodes it. What it does is make the claim auditable. A reader can check whether VanLehn says what the skill says, which is more than pm-skills or designpowers offer, and it is the first pack to put a falsifiable provenance claim in the machine-readable layer rather than the README.

Typed schemas, independently arrived at. Skills declare input_schema / output_schema with per-field types and descriptions — the same skill-as-typed-function move as pm-skills-arsenal, from an unrelated author in an unrelated vertical. Two independent instances make it a pattern in the standard’s use rather than one team’s idiosyncrasy, and both pair it with an MCP server that enumerates and invokes skills.

A vertical that points at the end user, not the professional. Every previous vertical serves the practitioner: PM, designer, marketer, security analyst. Domain 20 (student-learning, 13 skills) is written for live student interactions during study sessions — the person the professional’s work is about. The pack is aimed at teachers, curriculum designers, school leaders and EdTech builders, and then a fifth of it addresses the student directly.

Caveats

  • The evidence framing is the author’s own and unaudited. “Evidence-grounded” is a claim about the cited research, not about the skills, and no third party has checked either link.
  • GitHub reads the licence as unrecognized (NOASSERTION); the LICENSE file is Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0, © 2026 Gareth Manning.
  • Authority is self-described — 20 years of international-school teaching across 27 countries, per the README, with nothing else corroborating it.
  • Star count is a 2026-08-05 snapshot on a repository five months old.

Tier

T2 — first-party and self-interested, but the structure is verifiable: skill count, domain distribution, frontmatter fields and the plugin/MCP layout were all read from the repository rather than taken from the README. The pedagogical claims are not verified here.

agentskills-spec · agent-skills · pm-skills-arsenal · cybersecurity-skills · designpowers · hermes-agent · model-context-protocol · gareth-manning

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