Developmental Band System Designer Agent Skill

Design a developmental band system mapping student growth from early childhood through upper secondary.

Context cost
6.8k tokensestimated from the bundle, loaded when it triggers
Bundle
1 file · 27.0 kBtext throughout, nothing executable
Licence
not declarednone named by its author
Last change
—v1.0
Servers it uses
Noneruns standalone

What it does

Design a developmental band system mapping student growth from early childhood through upper secondary. Use when building competency-based curriculum architecture for a school or programme.

What this skill changes about the agent has not been set out here as a list. Its SKILL.md, shown below, says it in the author’s own words.

backwards-designband-systemcompetencycurriculum-designdevelopmental-bandsmanningmixed-agepiaget

The skill itself

A skill is instructions the model reads, so you can see what you are getting: below is the start of its SKILL.md. The front matter loads with every session, the body loads when the skill triggers, and the whole file comes with the install.

SKILL.md27.0 kB · preview
--- # AGENT SKILLS STANDARD FIELDS (v2) name: developmental-band-system-designer disable-model-invocation: true user-invocable: true effort: medium # EXISTING FIELDS skill_id: "original-frameworks/developmental-band-system-designer" skill_name: "Developmental Band System Designer" domain: "original-frameworks" version: "1.0" evidence_strength: "emerging" evidence_sources: - "Manning — Developmental band system (original, active implementation at REAL School Budapest)" - "Piaget (1952) — The origins of intelligence in children (developmental stages as rationale)" - "Vygotsky (1978) — Mind in society (ZPD applied to band-level specification)" - "Wiggins & McTighe (2005) — Understanding by Design (backwards design, extended with upstream 'why' layer)" - "Mixed-age grouping research (Lillard 2005, Montessori) — bands support rather than undermine mixed-age learning" input_schema: required: - field: "school_mission" type: "string" - field: "age_range" type: "string" - field: "programme_context" type: "string" optional: - field: "existing_competency_framework" type: "string" - field: "mixed_age_groupings" type: "string" - field: "subject_exceptions" type: "string" output_schema: type: "object" fields: - field: "band_architecture" type: "object" - field: "developmental_rationale" type: "object" - field: "competent_definition_logic" type: "object" - field: "exception_handling" type: "object" - field: "mixed_age_implications" type: "object" - field: "known_limitations" type: "object" chains_well_with: - "learning-target-authoring-guide" - "coherent-rubric-logic-builder" - "self-determined-project-design-protocol" - "curriculum-knowledge-architecture-designer" - "kud-knowledge-type-mapper" - "scope-and-sequence-designer" teacher_time: "6 minutes" tags: ["developmental-bands", "competency", "Manning", "curriculum-design", "Piaget", "backwards-design", "mixed-age", "band-system"] ---
75# Developmental Band System Designer
76
77## What This Skill Does
78
79This skill encodes an original practitioner framework developed by Gareth Manning, educator, curriculum designer, and learning systems designer. Unlike skills in other domains, it is not drawn from peer-reviewed research traditions. It is grounded in serious engagement with learning science, original curriculum design work, and active classroom testing. It is included because the methodology is coherent, transferable, and genuinely useful — and because intellectual honesty requires distinguishing practitioner frameworks from research-validated approaches.
80
81This skill designs a developmental band system for a competency-based curriculum — a framework that specifies what "competent" looks like at each broad developmental stage rather than at each individual grade level. It solves a problem that most competency frameworks ignore: the difference between what competent means for a 6-year-old versus a 12-year-old. UNESCO AI competency frameworks, most national curriculum documents, and frameworks like GreenComp and EntreComp list competencies without developmental specificity — leaving teachers to infer what "demonstrates critical thinking" means at age 7 versus age 14. The result is either impossibly vague expectations or arbitrary topic lists masquerading as developmental progression. The band system solves this by grouping ages into broad developmental bands (typically 4, mapping loosely to Piaget's stages) and specifying competent at EACH band — creating the developmental precision that flat competency lists lack, without the granularity overload of year-by-year standards. The output is a complete band architecture for a school or programme, including the number of bands, their developmental rationale, age/grade mapping, the logic for determining what competent means at each band, and guidance on subjects that require finer granularity than broad bands can provide.
82
83## Evidence Foundation
84
85Manning developed the band system through curriculum design work at REAL School Budapest, addressing a specific practical problem: when a school adopts a competency-based curriculum (particularly one that uses project-based learning and mixed-age groupings), it needs to know what competent looks like at different developmental stages — but existing competency frameworks don't provide this. A school using GreenComp, for example, finds that the framework specifies "Embracing complexity and sustainability" as a competency but says nothing about what this means for a 6-year-old versus a 14-year-old. The band system fills this gap. Piaget's (1952) stages of cognitive development provide the developmental anchoring, used as rationale rather than rigid prescription: Band A (approximately ages 5-7) aligns with late preoperational thinking — concrete, egocentric, perceptual; Band B (approximately ages 8-10) aligns with concrete operational thinking — logical operations on concrete objects, classification, seriation; Band C (approximately ages 10-12) aligns with early formal operational thinking — emerging abstract reasoning, hypothetical thinking; Band D (approximately ages 12-14) aligns with developing formal operational thinking — systematic reasoning, metacognition, abstract analysis. These are approximate alignments, not rigid prescriptions — developmental variability within any age group is large. Wiggins & McTighe (2005) provide the backwards design framework that Manning extends. Standard UBD begins with curriculum goals and works backwards: goals → assessment → instruction. Manning's extension adds an upstream "why" layer: mission → values → what the curriculum must prioritise → what it must NOT prioritise → competency selection → learning target decomposition → band specification. This "purpose-driven backwards design" means that every band statement can be traced back to the school's mission. Manning's critique of UBD: teachers in standard UBD are never asked WHY — they're given curriculum goals and work backwards from there. Purpose-driven backwards design starts earlier and produces more coherent systems. Vygotsky's (1978) zone of proximal development informs the band-level specification: each band statement describes what students can do WITH APPROPRIATE SUPPORT at that developmental stage — the upper edge of the ZPD, not the floor. Mixed-age grouping research (Lillard, 2005; Montessori) validates the band approach: bands support mixed-age learning by specifying competence at the BAND level rather than the grade level, so a mixed-age group of 8-10-year-olds can be assessed against the same Band B descriptors.
86
87## Input Schema
88
89The educator or curriculum designer must provide:
90- **School mission:** The core purpose. *e.g. "To develop young people who are capable, compassionate, and ready to contribute to a world that needs them — through real-world projects, genuine community engagement, and deep personal development" / "To provide a rigorous academic education grounded in the IB learner profile" / "To prepare students for meaningful lives through inquiry, creativity, and service"*
91- **Age range:** The full age range. *e.g. "Ages 5-14 (primary and lower secondary)" / "Ages 3-12 (early years through primary)" / "Ages 11-18 (secondary school)"*
92- **Programme context:** The type of learning. *e.g. "Project-based learning with mixed-age groupings, no traditional subjects — competencies taught through interdisciplinary projects" / "Subject-based with project weeks — maths, English, science as separate subjects, plus termly cross-curricular projects" / "IB PYP transitioning to a more competency-based approach"*
93
This is a preview of SKILL.md. Download or install the skill to get the whole thing.
In the file
SKILL.md3,733 words
Files1
Licencenot declared
Why you can read it

Nothing in a skill executes. The client loads the text and the model follows it, so a skill can be audited the way a runbook is — by reading it.

What it costs in context

Skills are not billed by the call. They are paid for in context: every token the instructions occupy is a token your code, your diff and your conversation cannot use. Here is what this one takes and when it takes it.

≈890
always loaded
The name and description, so the model knows the skill exists and when to reach for it.
5,860
on trigger
The instruction body, read only when the skill fires.
3.4%
of a 200k window
Ten skills this size would take about 34% of the window before you open a file.
050k100k150k200k context window

6.8k tokens, estimated from the bundle at four bytes to the token, held for the rest of the session once it triggers. Heavy. Teams tend to install this one per project rather than globally, and load it only when the job comes up.

Servers bill, skills cost

A server charges by the month. A skill charges once per session, in context, and then keeps charging it for as long as the session lives.

Before and after

The same question, put to the same model twice: once as it comes, and once with these instructions loaded.

No worked example has been published for this skill yet.

The procedure it runs

The procedure has not been set out here step by step. It is in the body of its SKILL.md: the start of it is shown above, and the whole file comes with the install.

Prose, not code

These steps are written for a model to follow, not executed by a runtime. It can still be told to skip one, and it will say so when it does.

Servers it uses

None. This skill calls no MCP servers at all.

Everything it needs is in the instructions, so it works in a project with nothing connected — the model reads the file and changes how it works with what it can already reach.

Its SKILL.md does not declare which tools it asks the agent for, so what it touches is whatever the instructions themselves ask for — read them before you install it.

What it asks for
Writes filesnot declared
Network accessnot declared

This SKILL.md carries no allowed-tools line, so neither is declared. A skill grants no permissions of its own — it can only ask for tools your client already has.

What it will not do

Every skill is narrow, and the useful ones say where they stop. These are the jobs this one is the wrong tool for.

What this skill is not for has not been published here. Nothing is implied by that: it is a section the author has not filled in.

What is in the bundle

1 file, 27.0 kB on disk. A bundle is text throughout: the instructions the model reads, plus the templates it fills in.

  • SKILL.md27.0 kB
What is not in it

No dependencies and nothing executable: a skill is text the agent reads, so the bundle is 1 file you can review in full before installing.

Install

Installing copies the bundle into your project. Nothing runs at install time — the files sit on disk until the model reads them.

# Developmental Band System Designer · 6.8k tokens when loaded · macOS, Linux mkdir -p .claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/developmental-band-system-designer/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/developmental-band-system-designer" ] && { [ ! -e .claude/skills/developmental-band-system-designer ] || { mv .claude/skills/developmental-band-system-designer "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/developmental-band-system-designer" .claude/skills/ && echo "Installed .claude/skills/developmental-band-system-designer"
On Windows, or any OS with Node 20+
npx mcprush@latest skill add garethmanning/developmental-band-system-designer

Windows PowerShell says 'running scripts is disabled on this system'? Run Set-ExecutionPolicy -Scope CurrentUser RemoteSigned once, or type npx.cmd instead of npx (codex.cmd, gemini.cmd, grok.cmd likewise). PowerShell 7 needs neither. Writes to .claude/skills/developmental-band-system-designer/ in the current project. For every project instead, run mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && t=$(mktemp -d) && curl -fsSL -o "$t/bundle.tar.gz" https://mcprush.com/api/skills/developmental-band-system-designer/bundle.tar.gz && tar -xzf "$t/bundle.tar.gz" -C "$t" && [ -d "$t/developmental-band-system-designer" ] && { [ ! -e ~/.claude/skills/developmental-band-system-designer ] || { mv ~/.claude/skills/developmental-band-system-designer "$t/.previous" && echo "Previous copy moved to $t/.previous"; }; } && mv "$t/developmental-band-system-designer" ~/.claude/skills/ && echo "Installed ~/.claude/skills/developmental-band-system-designer" (macOS, Linux) — or add --global to the npx line. The curl line replaces .claude/skills/developmental-band-system-designer/ only after the download succeeds, so files left there by another skill of the same name, or by an older release, do not mix in. A copy already there is moved aside, not deleted, and the line prints where.

Which clients pick it up on their own

A skill is a folder of text. Most of these read a skills folder and pick it up without being told; the rest take the same folder another way — an upload in the app, a parameter on an API call — and then choose it by its description just the same.

Claude Code.claude/skills/
Claude DesktopCustomize › Skills
ChatGPTSkills › Create › Upload
Cursor.cursor/skills/
VS Code.github/skills/
Codex CLI.agents/skills/
Gemini CLI.gemini/skills/
Grok Build.grok/skills/
Microsoft CopilotSkills › Upload a skill
PerplexityComputer › Skills › Upload a skill
DeepSeek Harness.dsh/skills/
Zed.agents/skills/
Devin Desktop.devin/skills/
Windsurf (legacy).windsurf/skills/
OpenAI Agents SDKInstructions or sandbox Skills
HTTP / APIa request parameter
This release
Version1.0
Publishedno release date on file
PriceFree
Referencegarethmanning/developmental-band-system-designer

Versions

v1.0 is what is on the shelf; no release here carries a date. Instructions change more often than APIs do — a skill can be rewritten entirely without anything it depends on moving.

v1.0
  • No earlier releases have been published to the marketplace.
Pinning

The install command always fetches the release that is current the day you run it — v1.0 today — and cannot ask for an earlier one. The copy on your disk does not change until you run it again.

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