Job Description

Job Title: Project Manager/ Senior Project Manager, School Governance - Nagaland

Organisation: Central Square Foundation

Team: School Governance

Location: New Delhi (with frequent 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 School Governance 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 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.

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 — including on regulatory bodies, behaviour change cases, and public disclosure practices across sectors.
• Synthesise field insights and stakeholder feedback into evidence-based recommendations for programme and communication strategy.

• Communications and Content Creation
  • Build public discourse around school accountability and transparency by creating compelling narratives across formats — videos, podcasts, infographics, reports, op-eds.
  • Translate complex governance and assessment data into simple, accessible language for diverse audiences including rural communities, frontline workers, and policy audiences.
  • Develop vernacular and multilingual communication materials suited to CSF's partner state contexts.

• Community Outreach and Field Engagement:
  • Design and conduct pilots to test communication strategies that can drive behaviour change around school quality.
  • Develop and implement community engagement campaigns targeting parents, school management committees (SMCs), and local elected representatives to strengthen accountability at the school level.

Required Qualifications/Mindsets:

• 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 working with or alongside government systems — at state, district, or block level — and an understanding of how public programmes operate on the ground.
• Experience in behaviour science and behaviour change programmes is preferred but not mandatory
• Field-first orientation: A genuine curiosity about ground-level realities and comfort spending time in communities, block offices, and government settings.
• Comfort with complexity: Ability to hold nuance — working simultaneously with government officials, community members, and technical experts, and communicating appropriately with each.
• Open to frequent travel