Meetings are where plans are made, priorities are negotiated and responsibilities are shared. They are also where detail can disappear remarkably quickly.
A hurried set of notes rarely captures the full conversation. A transcript captures everything, but does not tell you what matters. And an action list without context can leave people wondering what they actually agreed.
Starlight’s new meeting report closes that gap. Upload a meeting recording and Starlight turns the conversation into a structured, editable working record: a clear summary, key decisions, named actions, open questions and the topics discussed. The original audio and transcript remain available, so the report is grounded in what was actually said.
This is a significant step beyond lesson uploads. Starlight can now support the professional conversations around teaching, leadership and school improvement as well as the classroom practice itself.
One upload, a report built for follow-through
When you add audio, Starlight can automatically identify whether it is a lesson, meeting, CPD session or another type of professional conversation. You can also select Meeting yourself. Completed meetings sit in their own tab under Audio Submissions, making them easy to find without mixing them into lesson recordings.
Once processing is complete, the meeting report gives you:
- an editable summary of the conversation;
- key decisions, each with space for the detail behind it;
- actions grouped under the people responsible;
- a checkbox for every action, with progress visible as tasks are completed;
- open questions that still need an answer;
- a topic-by-topic account of what was discussed;
- speaker identification, including short audio samples to help replace “Speaker 1” and “Speaker 2” with real names;
- access to the full transcript and original audio; and
- a PDF download for meetings that need a portable record.
Nothing is locked down as if the AI must have the final word. You can edit the summary, decisions, actions, questions and topic notes; add anything that was missed; remove anything that is not useful; and mark the report as reviewed when it is ready.
That matters. Good minutes are not a mechanical record of every sentence. They are a useful account of what the group understood, decided and committed to do. Starlight does the first pass, while people retain the judgement.
Turn talk into ownership
The most useful part may be the action tracking.
Instead of ending a meeting with a loose collection of promises, Starlight identifies the actions in the conversation and organises them under named people. Rename the speakers and the report becomes immediately clearer: each person can see what they own, while the group can see how much has been completed.
Each task can be checked off when it is done. You can also add an action that was agreed after the recording or sharpen the wording before saving. The result is not just a set of minutes to archive. It is a live bridge between one meeting and the next.
Imagine reopening a department meeting a fortnight later. Rather than starting with “Where did we get to?”, you can see the decisions, the outstanding questions and the actions still to complete. The administrative record becomes part of the improvement process.
Organise meetings around the work
Not every meeting belongs in the same pile. Starlight lets you organise meetings in two complementary ways.
Board columns show where the follow-up has reached: Unassigned, Awaiting Review, Actions Outstanding or Completed.
Tags show what the meeting was about: Marketing, Pastoral & Safeguarding, Department & Team, Parents & Carers, Leadership & Governance or Strategy. You can also leave a meeting untagged or create your own meeting categories.
That gives you a simple workflow. A newly processed report can wait for review; a reviewed meeting can remain visible while actions are outstanding; and a finished conversation can move to Completed. At the same time, tags make it easier to return to a strand of work — for example, every strategy discussion or every department and team meeting — without relying on memory or inconsistent file names.
Specific, timely, actionable and regular
At Starlight, we believe useful feedback should be specific, timely, actionable and regular. The same four words provide a strong test for meeting practice.
Specific means the record is anchored in the actual conversation. Decisions retain their detail, actions are written clearly and topic notes preserve the context that a bare bullet point would lose.
Timely means the report is available while the meeting is still fresh and before follow-up is due. People can correct a name, refine an action or resolve an ambiguity before memory starts rewriting the conversation.
Actionable means minutes answer “what happens next?” Named owners and completion checkboxes turn discussion into visible commitments. Open questions make uncertainty explicit rather than allowing it to hide inside a paragraph.
Regular means using the same rhythm every time: record, review, act and revisit. Board columns and tags help create that rhythm across a series of meetings, so actions do not vanish when attention moves to the next agenda.
The four work together. A detailed report produced too late is less useful. A quick summary with no owners changes little. A perfect action list that is never reopened will not build momentum. Better meetings depend on a repeatable loop.
Where could meeting reports help?
The feature is designed to be flexible enough for the varied conversations that shape a school or organisation. It could support:
- senior leadership and strategy meetings;
- department, faculty and phase meetings;
- governance discussions;
- coaching conversations and professional learning communities;
- CPD planning and review; and
- project, partnership and renewal meetings.
- and more.
As with every Starlight upload, your data is private to you unless you choose to share it. Leaders see anonymised, aggregated insights rather than your private individual material.
Fewer forgotten promises, more purposeful follow-up
The real cost of poor meeting notes is not the time spent writing them. It is the decision revisited because nobody can remember it, the action that had no clear owner, and the useful question that disappeared before the next conversation.
Starlight’s meeting reports give those conversations a memory and a route forward. Upload the audio, review the report, name the people, refine the actions and keep the work moving.
The best meeting minutes do more than record the past. They make the next step easier to take.
Spark insight with Starlight — in every lesson and every professional conversation.
