About the job Project Manager/ Senior Project Manager - School Governance
Organisation: Central Square Foundation
Team: School Governance
Location: Gandhinagar, Gujarat (travel within the state and periodic travel to Delhi)
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:
The School Governance team at Central Square Foundation envisions a transformed school education delivery system that is principally accountable and transparent about its learning outcomes. It targets measuring and publicising the achievement of quality outcomes in public and private schools and establishing a State Schools Standards Authority to enable this reform.
The Problem
Despite extensive efforts to increase access to education, learning outcomes have remained alarmingly stagnant in the current educational landscape. Major government initiatives have focused on expanding access and providing input to schools, but their impact on improving educational outcomes has been tenuous, at best. An absence of outcomes-oriented and evidence-based governance is aggravated by a regulatory system where the government runs its own schools and regulates all schools, posing a conflict of interest due to the operator being the regulator. Further, there is no way to reliably measure the learning attainment of schools, making it difficult to hold them accountable for results.
The Solution
CSF's Schools Governance team acknowledges the pressing need for a systemic reform in education, which can be solved with a two-fold approach. The states need to: -
Establish a robust and reliable learning outcome indicator at the school level by assessing student competencies through a competency-based census assessment (CCA). This will involve public disclosure of school data, while keeping the student data anonymous, to transparently show every school's quality and nudge them to make the necessary improvements.
Create an independent school regulator, the State School Standards Authority (SSSA), which will operate outside the current Department of School Education. This body will focus on setting school standards and demand accountability from all schools, government or private.
About the work in Gujarat
CSF's School Governance team helps states move from input-based regulation to outcome-based regulation, in line with the National Education Policy 2020 (NEP 2020). In Gujarat this means three connected pieces of work: building a reliable, school-level learning indicator through a Competency-based Census Assessment (CCA); enabling public disclosure of school quality while keeping student data anonymous; and supporting the State School Standards Authority (SSSA) as a regulator. Gujarat already runs a school quality programme, Gunotsav, which this work seeks to strengthen and align to outcomes.
Position Summary
You will run CSF's day-to-day execution of this programme in Gujarat. You are the single point of accountability who keeps government partners, technology vendors, and the internal team moving together. You are stepping into a live programme with existing relationships, an in-progress portal build, and a current roadmap, so the first priority is to absorb context quickly and hold continuity, not to rebuild from scratch.
Key responsibilities
1. Programme execution
Own the Gujarat workplan, timelines, and deliverables for the SSSA programme, covering the CCA, public disclosure, and the supporting portal systems.
Keep the programme on track against milestones, surface risks early, and drive decisions to closure.
2. Government and stakeholder management
Be CSF's primary working contact for the state education department, GCERT (Gujarat Council of Educational Research and Training), the SSSA body, and data or hosting agencies.
Build trust at both the official and field level, manage approvals and clearances, and turn CSF's recommendations into actions the government can adopt.
3. Quality assurance and Gunotsav
Develop a clear view of where Gunotsav helps and where it falls short against the outcome-based intent of NEP 2020, keeping students and parents as the test of value.
Work with the state to improve how assessment is done, how results are disclosed, and how findings feed back into teaching and school improvement.
4. Product, portal, and vendor coordination
Translate ground realities into clear requirements, user stories, and acceptance criteria for the school quality and assessment portals.
Manage technology vendors on scope, delivery, quality, and timelines, and steer the path to production readiness across security, performance, scale, data privacy, and hosting.
Coordinate integrations where needed, for example with UDISE+ (Unified District Information System for Education Plus).
5. Monitoring and continuity
Track adoption and usage, and share regular dashboards and honest progress updates with the state team and leadership.
Keep clean documentation, decision logs, and a current handover record so the programme never depends on one person's memory.
Required Qualifications, Skills, and Abilities
5 to 9 years of experience delivering complex programmes or technology-enabled projects, ideally in government, public systems, or the social sector.
A graduate or postgraduate degree in any discipline.
A track record of managing external vendors on time and quality.
Strong stakeholder management, structured problem-solving, and clear written communication.
Comfort working with data and digital platforms, including requirements, quality assurance, and releases. You do not need to write code, but you must be able to hold vendors to account on it.
Fluent in English. Working Gujarati is a strong advantage for the field and government interface.
Willing to be based in Gandhinagar and travel within the state.
Familiarity with the Indian school education landscape and state-level systems. (preferred)
Exposure to GovTech or large public sector platforms, and to government hosting and compliance, for example NIC hosting, security audits, and data protection. (preferred)
Experience taking a product or programme from pilot to stable operation at scale. (preferred)
Remuneration competitive with Indian philanthropy pay scales, based on experience.
Start date: Immediate.