Director of Programmes

TwentyCi Ltd; United Kingdom; Remote; GBP 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Global Schools Forum (GSF) is seeking a Director of Programmes to sit on the Senior Management Team and shape the delivery of its multi-year portfolio across foundational learning, early years, and secondary education and employment pathways. The role leads GSF’s largest team and ensures a strong link between community needs, learning outcomes, and systemic impact.

You will drive strategy, governance, and performance, building scalable processes and ensuring high-quality, evidence-based

Responsibilities

• Portfolio ownership: oversee the design, delivery, and quality of GSF’s programmes portfolio across foundational learning, early years, and secondary education and employment pathways.
• Technical collaboration: work with the Associate Directors to ensure delivery is high- quality, evidence-based, and impactful for children and partner organisations.
• Programme quality: establish and maintain clear standards for programme design, implementation, monitoring, and learning across all workstreams.

Job description

Global Schools Forum

Director of Programmes

Candidate Pack

October 2026

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.

GSF holds a role no other organisation in this sector plays: we are the connective tissue for organisations across low- and middle-income countries who are wrestling with the same hard problems, often without knowing who else is wrestling with them too. Our programmes turn that connective tissue into shared progress on some of education’s biggest challenges:

• Ensuring every child gains strong foundations in literacy and numeracy.
• Scaling access to high-quality early years care and education.
• Ensuring meaningful transitions into secondary education and into employment.

Three cross-cutting themes run through all of this work: learning differences, innovativefinancing, and artificial intelligence (AI) in education. Rather than standalone areas, theyare lenses that shape how programmes are designed and delivered across foundationallearning, early years, and secondary education and employment pathways: making surechildren who learn differently are identified early and supported to learn, developingfinancing models that reward improved learning outcomes, and harnessing AI andtechnology to drive learning. GSF’s dedicated work on these themes currently sits withinthe foundational learning portfolio.

Join us at a moment of real momentum. We are positioned for additional significant growth, and the impact of this role will be felt in the quality and reach of our programmes portfolio, and in how well GSF’s largest team is set up to deliver it. We are a small, fully-remote global team with colleagues based in the UK and across Africa and Asia, reflecting the communities in which we work. We welcome applicants for this role from the UK, where we are headquartered, and the global south where we operate, with a preference for candidates within a time zone of GMT-2 to GMT+5:30.

Role Purpose

This is a rare opportunity to shape how GSF’s programmes are delivered, and how well our largest team is set up to deliver them. As Director of Programmes, you will sit on our Senior Management Team (SMT) and take strategic ownership of the portfolio that sits at the heart of GSF’s work.

• 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 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 theteam 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 seniormanagement 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 ofpractices and evidence-based advocacy with system stakeholders that can influence thebroader 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, andglobal 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 thepipeline 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.

Key responsibilities

Programme leadership and delivery (40%)

• Portfolio ownership: oversee the design, delivery, and quality of GSF’s programmes portfolio, spanning foundational learning, early years, and a growing body of work in secondary education and employment pathways.
• Technical collaboration: work with the Associate Directors across each portfolio area, including Foundational Learning and Early Years, to ensure delivery is high- quality, evidence-based, and delivers real impact for children and for the organisations we support.
• Programme quality: establish and maintain clear standards for programme design, implementation, monitoring, and learning across all workstreams.

Operational excellence (25%)

• Continuous improvement: identify opportunities to improve operational delivery across the portfolio, from planning and budgeting cycles through to reporting.
• Cross-project learning and knowledge management: facilitate and oversee the documentation of learning across projects, connecting the dots across programmes so that good practice travels rather than staying siloed.
  Standard operating procedures: create and implement the standard operating procedures that keep delivery consistent, well-governed, and efficient.

Team leadership (20%)

• Team management: manage GSF’s largest team, giving people clarity, direction, and room to do their best work.
  Mentoring and growth: mentor and develop the team, especially the Associate Directors, creating clear growth pathways and providing thought leadership that strengthens the team’s technical and strategic capability.
• Resourcing: put in place, and own, the processes for allocating team members across projects, so the right expertise lands on the right work at the right time.
  Cross-functional deployment: work with functional leads across labs design, operations, technology, and evidence to make sure specialist expertise is well-deployed across the portfolio.