About the job Project Manager / Senior Project Manager - School Governance
Job Title: Project Manager/Senior Project Manager
Organisation: Central Square Foundation
Team: School Governance, Central team
Location: New Delhi (with travel to our key states on a need basis)
About Central Square Foundation:
Central Square Foundation is a nonprofit organisation working with the vision of ensuring quality school education for all children in India. Since 2012, we have been partnering with the government and ecosystem stakeholders to improve the learning outcomes of children, especially from low-income communities. We are driven by our mission to enable the school education system to adopt solutions that are scalable, sustainable, and effective, so that all children get equal access to opportunities needed for leading a better life. CSF has prioritised 4 critical areas of work:
(1) Foundational Literacy & Numeracy (FLN)
(2) EdTech
(3) Early Childhood Education (ECE)
(4) School Governance
Learn more about CSF on our website.
About the team:
About School Governance
The Government of India has carried out several large-scale initiatives over the last few years. The objective was to provide necessary inputs and access to strengthen the school education system. While these were pivotal steps that facilitated achieving near-universal enrolment in primary grades, it is imperative for the governance focus to now shift to ensuring attainment of learning outcomes. The challenge is clear: there is little consistent measurement of learning, and limited public accountability for school quality. Parents, communities, and even policymakers lack access to clear, comparable data about how schools are performing. This persistent "information gap" means schools often continue without sufficient pressure or support to improve learning outcomes.
To solve for this, there is a need for a:
Regulatory mechanism for schools that ensures accountability for making children learn
Reliable, standardised and uniform measures to assess learning at the school level, as most schools with varying board affiliations conduct their own examinations in elementary grades. Additionally, the existence of grade 10 and 12 is limited to less than one-fifth of the country’s total schools and comes too late in a child’s educational journey to drive substantial improvements.
At CSF, we look at governance-level reforms that make schools accountable for learning and underpins the role of a neutral body in measuring this learning reliably. We support the institutionalisation of:
State School Standards Authority: we provide evidence-based knowledge in its set up as a specialised, independent and neutral regulator for the sector as laid out in the NEP 2020.
Competency-based Census Assessments (CCA) to Measure Outcomes in Schools: we engage with the state/national assessment bodies in implementing standardised competency-based census assessments to generate reliable and comparable learning outcomes data to measure performance of schools.
Position Summary
We are seeking a dynamic professional to support CSF's School Governance team in building political and public awareness around school accountability and transparency reforms. Our communications goal is to drive behaviour change among diverse stakeholders—parents, teachers, principals, bureaucrats, and politicians—strengthening the demand for learning outcomes, which will lead to improvement of learning outcomes.
This is a high-variety role. On any given day, you might draft donor compliance reports, design visual content, analyse pilot data, attend meetings with government officials, or strategise community outreach in our partner states.
Key Responsibilities
Research and Analysis - Conduct primary and secondary research to inform strategy such as research on other regulatory bodies, behavior change cases, other sectors doing public disclosure etc.
Communications and Content Creation - Build public discourse around school accountability and transparency by creating simple, compelling narratives in various formats such as videos, podcasts, infographics, reports, Op-eds
Community Outreach and Field Engagement - Conduct pilots to test communication strategies that can drive behaviour change around school quality
Required Qualifications
Bachelor's or Master's degree in Education, Communications, Public Policy, Development Studies, or related fields
2-6 years of relevant work experience, preferably in the education or development sector.
Experience in behavior science and behavior change programmes is preferred but not mandatory
Additional Details
Start Date: As soon as possible
Compensation: Remuneration will be competitive with Indian philanthropy pay scales and will depend upon the candidate’s experience levels.