Project Lead

Project Lead - School Governance, Central Square Foundation

Job Title: Project Lead

Organization: Central Square Foundation

Team: School Governance

Location: Jaipur (regular travel to Bikaner, Udaipur, Delhi)

About Central Square Foundation:

Founded in 2012, Central Square Foundation (CSF) is a non-profit philanthropic foundation working on the vision of ensuring quality school education for all children in India. We are driven by our mission to transform the school education system with a focus on improving children's learning outcomes, especially in low-income communities.

Learn more about CSF on our website.

About the team:

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 enrollment in primary grades, it is imperative for the governance focus to now shift to ensuring attainment of learning outcomes.

To achieve this, there is a need for a:

• Regulatory mechanism for schools that holds them accountable 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.

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: CSF provides evidence-based knowledge to the states to set up a specialised, independent and neutral regulator for the sector as laid out in the NEP 2020.

• Competency-based Census Assessments (CCA): To measure learning outcomes in schools, CSF engages 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.

• 
  School Grading/Certification: The state plans to grade/certify schools based on their achievement of learning outcomes as measured through a variety of standardised assessments.

Position Summary

Your key role will be to make the community empowered with data, choices and enabling trust through public disclosure of the learning quality of each school in the state. While the state has a variety of standardised assessments at various stages of schooling - grades 3, 5, 8, 10, 12 - there is no reporting to the community which deserves to know the quality of learning in the schools nearby.
Your role will be to ensure that the data from these assessments leads to a determination of school learning quality, and that the right channels are explored and utilised to put this information in the public domain.

Key Responsibilities

• Align top bureaucrats in the state to implement public disclosure of school (both private and public) learning quality

• Manage a team in RSCERT, the state’s academic body, to ensure quality standardised assessments in the state

• Plan and implement pilots to showcase efficacy of public disclosure of school quality in improvement of learning outcomes

• Coordinate with the internal expert teams at CSF to get the best out of any exercise in the state

• Share processes with other School Governance teams to build common knowledge

Required Qualifications, Skills, and Abilities

• 6 to 8 years of work experience with at least 4 years in the development sector, especially in devising and implementing strategies with the top bureaucrats in any sector

• Experience in delivering managerial responsibilities, demonstrating superb project management, project delivery and project leadership

• Excellent research skills and the ability to analyse complex qualitative and quantitative data, craft possible solutions, and recommend actions

• Bachelor’s degree from a reputed university is required; a Master’s degree preferred in education, development studies, and social sciences

• Fluent in English and Hindi with excellent reading and writing skills, preference for candidates that know the local dialects

• Strong growth and learning mindset

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.