Director of Programmes

Global Schools Forum

Director of Programmes

Candidate Pack

October 2026

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, innovative financing, and artificial intelligence (AI) in education. Rather than standalone areas, theyare lenses that shape how programmes are designed and delivered across foundational learning, early years, and secondary education and employment pathways: making sure children who learn differently are identified early and supported to learn, developing financing models that reward improved learning outcomes, and harnessing AI and technology 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.

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.
• Alon…