Global Schools Forum (GSF) – hiring Director of Programmes ( Remote)

About Global Schools Forum  

Global Schools Forum (GSF) connects and strengthens a global community of over 200 non-state education organisations across 70+ countries. Since 2017, we have become a leading accelerator for locally-led education innovation in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, supporting non-state education organisations to innovate, deepen impact, and achieve scale.

We work as a global learning community, innovation accelerator, and partnership builder. We connect local leadership, share knowledge and insights, incubate and diffuse promising education solutions, and engage in policy-shaping dialogue to strengthen education systems. Our community collectively reaches 135 million children, and our Labs  and Impact Accelerator programmes have supported innovations that now reach an additional one million children with better quality education and care.

We are at an inflection point in our journey, having grown five-fold over the last five years. Our 2025–28 strategy marks an ambitious next chapter, with a renewed focus on community, knowledge, funding, and partnerships, and a deepening commitment to early years, foundational learning, secondary education, and leveraging technology. Our vision remains that all children realise their potential through safe access to quality education.

• Programmes sit at the heart of this role. You will oversee our portfolios in foundational learning, early years, and secondary education and employment pathways, working closely with the Associate Directors so they deliver high impact for children and for the organisations we support.
• Alongside this, you will lead GSF’s largest team, putting in place the processes we need to allocate people well, learn across projects, and keep raising our operational bar.

This is not a traditional programme management role. GSF’s programmes are tightly integrated with our community: the organisations we support are also members of the GSF community, and our programmes are only valuable when they are fully informed by members’ needs. What we learn together then informs collective action beyond our community: changing practice in classrooms and influencing government policy and funder strategy across the wider education ecosystem. You will be expected to hold that link deliberately, ensuring that we maintain trust with GSF’s community, that programme design is shaped by what we hear from our community, and that what we learn through delivery is shared back and drives meaningful change in practices in the classrooms and at the systems level.

You are more than an excellent programme leader: you are purpose-driven. You bring genuine curiosity about how programmes translate into real change for children and collective action to move the sector, and you see yourself as building the systems and the team that let GSF deliver impactful programmes at scale, not just overseeing delivery.

How you’ll create impact
• Programme judgement: you know where GSF’s programmatic effort will create the most impact for children, and you can prioritise a broad portfolio accordingly.
• Operational rigour: you turn learning from across projects into simple, practical systems that make delivery better, not just busier.
• People leadership: you build and support GSF’s largest team, giving people clarity,direction, and room to do their best work

Portfolio overview 
Our programmes portfolio is organised across three areas: foundational learning, early years (childcare and ECED), and a growing body of work in secondary education and employment pathways. Community strategy and engagement is owned across the senior management team and implemented by each member of the GSF team in a matrixed and collaborative way.

Foundational learning
Our foundational learning portfolio focuses on foundational literacy and numeracy (FLN): the systems and innovations needed to ensure all children can read with meaning, write, and perform basic mathematical calculations. This includes a growing body of work supporting organisations to strengthen their foundational learning programmes, with an increased focus on improving literacy outcomes. Across the portfolio, the work combines direct and high-impact support to education organisations with effective diffusion of practices and evidence-based advocacy with system stakeholders that can influence the broader sector.

Early years
Our early years portfolio, spanning childcare and early childhood education and development (ECED), has a similar focus to the FLN portfolio and includes a wide range of programmes for organisational support, evidence generation, and ecosystem influence. Examples include the Impact at Scale Labs and our Early Childhood in Emergencies Evidence Hub. The team is connecting practitioner insights with the broader evidence base, and bringing these messages into conversations with government, funders, and global policymakers.

Secondary education and employment pathways
Secondary education is a newer and growing body of work, building on our foundational learning expertise to support locally-led organisations as children move into secondary school and from secondary education into employment, with several opportunities in the pipeline that would significantly scale the work.

Community
GSF’s community connects and supports our network of over 230 non-state education organisations across 70+ countries. Our community engagement strategy is shaped by the Senior Management Team (SMT), and its implementation is shared between two verticals, Programmes and External Affairs, each responsible for different parts of the strategy and drawing on time allocations from colleagues across the organisation. In this role, you will lead the Programmes vertical’s part of that implementation, working closely with External Affairs to drive growth, engagement, and the diffusion of promising practices. This takes sustained, dedicated time: you will engage regularly with senior leaders across member organisations, stay on top of their priorities, and convene community-focused events, including alongside major external conferences, to spread what works.

• agendas.
• A track record of leading complex, multi-workstream programme portfolios, managing multiple teams, funders, and delivery contexts simultaneously with rigour and care.
• A strong track record of managing large, distributed teams, including setting up the systems needed to allocate people well across multiple projects.
• Experience working closely with technical experts, such as technical leads or advisors, to translate technical excellence into high-quality delivery.
• A track record of improving operational delivery: spotting inefficiencies, building standard operating procedures, and embedding learning across projects.
• Strong strategic judgement, able to prioritise across a broad and varied portfolio.
• Experience working at, or preparing materials for, senior leadership or board level.
• A track record of securing major funding for education programmes, including building and managing relationships with key funders and leading the development of successful proposals.
• A genuine commitment to GSF’s mission and values.

• Direct experience of programme implementation in foundational literacy and numeracy or early years programming (including childcare and ECED) in low-resource or emergency-affected contexts.
• Experience in a membership or network organisation.
• Experience of AI in education, either in programme design and delivery or in understanding how AI tools can strengthen organisational effectiveness

Terms and Conditions

Location
GSF is a fully remote organisation. We welcome applications from the UK, where we are headquartered, and the global south where we work, with a preference for candidates within a time zone of GMT-2 to GMT+5:30. Local work authorisation in your country of residence is required. Please note that we are unable to offer visa sponsorship for this role.
Some international travel may be required.

Salary
GSF uses location-based salary bands to ensure fair and equitable pay across regions. Our baseline compensation is anchored to the UK market salary range. As we hire globally, your final offer will be adjusted to reflect local market data of your country of residence.

Examples of localised salary expectations for this role:

United Kingdom £80,080 – £86,320
Kenya* £60,060—£64,740
India* INR 7,095,922 – INR7,645,157
*The final package will include health insurance.