Impact and Innovation Manager

About Global Schools Forum Global Schools Forum (GSF) is a collaborative community of non-state organisations working to improve education outcomes for disadvantaged children in low and middle-income countries. Our vision is that all children can realise their potential through safe access to quality education. Since our establishment in 2017, we’ve grown our community to 183+ community members spanning 70+ countries from India, to Uganda to Brazil, collectively running or supporting over 1.39m schools and centres and providing education to well over 139 million children. Our community comprises standalone schools, such as MAIA Impact working with Mayan girls in Guatemala; school networks working within or across countries, including organisations like Hippocampus working in India or United World Schools working in Cambodia, Myanmar, Nepal and Madagascar; and organisations providing core support services to non-state schools, such as EdPartners Africa that provides financial services to schools in Kenya or Instill Education that provides a variety of teacher development offers across Africa. GSF’s Strategy Currently Covers These Core Areas Knowledge Accelerator: We focus on creating, codifying and sharing evidence and best practices to enhance member knowledge and capabilities. Our efforts also include providing thought leadership and influencing policy on a global scale. Funding Catalyst : We are focused on sub-granting to facilitate testing and scaling initiatives. This includes creating new on-granting vehicles for our members, such as financing low-fee private schools and advocating for foundational learning. Additionally, we aim to connect our members with funders and vice versa Partnership Builder: We facilitate partnerships among our members, connect them with global actors, and foster collaborations with governments to scale innovations. Additionally, we broker research partnerships to enhance our collective impact. Community Convenor: Fostering connection, trust, and relationship building among GSF members is essential for creating a vibrant and supportive community. By encouraging open communication and collaboration, we can strengthen the bonds between members, ensuring that everyone feels valued and included. This sense of belonging not only enhances individual experiences but also fortifies the GSF community as a whole, paving the way for shared growth and success. 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. Our Values Education Our Values are central to everything we do as a team, as a global community and in our engagements with partners, funders and the global education community: Collaboration: We leverage each other's strengths and knowledge to drive and amplify purpose driven collective action. Intentional Inclusivity: We cultivate and celebrate diversity of backgrounds, culture, perspectives, and approaches promoting inclusivity and mutual respect. Continuous Improvement: We commit to continuously learning, improving, and innovating, while sharing best practices and failures. Honesty and Transparency: We conduct ourselves with integrity, openness, accountability and kindness. Role Purpose The Impact & Innovation Manager will support Global Schools Forum’s mission to accelerate effective childcare and education solutions through impact measurement, learning, and evidence generation across its innovation and scale programmes. Working across the Impact at Scale Labs, the Impact Accelerator, innovative financing initiatives, and diffusion efforts, the role will operationalise GSF’s MEL strategy to ensure timely, meaningful data collection while also codifying and sharing actionable learning from across the portfolio to support replication of effective scale strategies. In the first year, the role will focus primarily on strengthening GSF’s impact measurement systems and supporting the Impact at Scale Labs - Early Years in East Africa. Overtime, priorities and responsibilities may change to include other areas of work. A: Impact Measurement, Learning & Evidence Measuring GSF’s impact GSF has recently refreshed its strategy and Theory of Change. As part of this work, we have also refined how we are measuring our impact over time. We intend to strengthen this further by ensuring we are collecting data using nimble and rigorous processes on the metrics that matter the most. This includes developing systems that are consistent across programmes, streamlining data processing, and allowing data to be analysed and compared over time. We need robust, easy-to-use dashboards that can generate actionable insights that inform improvement to our programs over time. We also aim to ensure our data and insights are accessible, engaging, and useful for internal teams, partners, funders, and wider stakeholders, helping to clearly demonstrate our contribution to scaling effective education innovations and their impact on improving learning outcomes. B. About GSF’s Innovation Programmes The Impact at Scale Labs GSF launched the Impact at Scale Labs to support promising, locally led education organisations to scale their impact. The programme systematically sources, screens, contracts, funds and supports high-potential solutions particularly those providing solutions for early childhood development and foundational learning. The Labs provide technical support to strengthen evidence, build sustainable models and partnerships, and develop pathways and networks for scale. Since 2021, the Labs have supported 14 organisations across three cohorts—two global calls and one national call in Kenya—with two additional calls planned for 2026. Based on the current pipeline, the programme is on track to support more than 50 organisations by 2030. The Labs offer includes: Flexible Funding: selected organisations receive up to $200,000 to implement and accelerate their scale plans; Tailored technical support and coaching: organisations receive 18 months of tailor-made support to test new pathways to scale and build a foundation for sustainability; Evidence-building activities: organisations are supported to build appropriate mechanisms to collect data and evidence to support their decision-making; Access to ecosystem partners: organisations actively engage with the global GSF member base and wider network to build partnerships for scale; Wide platform of peers: organisations access a platform to share evidence and encourage replication of impactful solutions. The Impact Accelerator The Labs have enabled GSF to validate the assumption that strengthening the capacity of organisations in targeted areas such as defining a scale strategy, impact measurement, and fundraising have a significant effect on capability of organisations to scale. The Accelerator leverages the tools and resources developed through the Labs and maintains its distinct value proposition, as follows: Focus on building capabilities: In the Accelerator, the focus is on in-depth catalytic support to help accelerate funding and impact, over 9 months. Organisations do not receive grant funding from GSF as part of the Accelerator. Flexible offer: In the Accelerator, the support is customised to the broader needs of the organisation as identified in the diagnostic phase. This means the support could exclude the testing of a specific innovation if that does not emerge as a priority in the diagnostic phase. Asynchronous support: The Accelerator will build out and test several in-depth online modules of support which future Accelerator cohorts can follow asynchronously, with on-demand support from the GSF team and external experts. Innovative Financing GSF, Kaizenvest, IDP Foundation and Varthana undertook a landscape assessment to assess the potential for lending to non-state education providers. The work has evolved over time to lead to the set-up of a $100M+ blended finance fund, focused on improving holistic well-being of children, especially around improved health, education and climate resilience in Sub-Saharan Africa. As the first phase investment of this Fund of $2M, IDP Foundation and GSF have launched the Incentives for Learning programme in Kenya alongside two local Kenyan financial partners. The program will test out how financial rewards linked to learning outcomes to loan products can drive improved outcomes for children. C. Diffusion Based on our learnings, GSF developed the Impact at Scale Toolkit, a library of in-depth scale tools and case studies organisations use to navigate their scale journeys. We have partnered with HundrED, Schools2030 and the Jacobs Foundation to create a user friendly mechanism to support the translation and uptake of scaling research for the education community. We also share learnings from our innovation work through targeted communities of practice, conferences, and meetings. Responsibilities In the first year, the key responsibilities of the Impact & Innovation Manager will include: • Support the implementation of GSF’s impact measurement processes. • Support the collection and analysis of organisational KPI progress data, generating insights that inform reflection, learning, and decision-making across GSF. • Lead or support the design, administration, and analysis of annual progress and impact surveys, ensuring data quality, rigour, and actionable insights. • Maintain and refine impact measurement tools and databases, ensuring alignment with GSF’s Theory of Change, organisational priorities, and reporting requirements. • Develop and enhance dashboards and reporting systems to clearly communicate GSF’s impact, project performance, KPIs and other organisational data for internal and external audiences. • Oversee data quality assurance and version control, including cleaning, validation, documentation and secure storage of data. Coordination and execution of technical support across the Labs and Accelerator programmes, including: • Onboarding and supporting organisations through a diagnostic to understand their challenges, needs and priorities to ultimately prepare an individualised programme journey. • Supporting the planning and execution of an offsite for the participating organisations. • Portfolio managing organisations and collaborating with internal GSF teams and external consultants to support them to reach their milestones and unlock their funding tranches. • Providing coaching to participating organisations in core programme pathways, particularly on evidence generation & MEL and oversee all aspects of their participation. • Facilitating connections with the wider GSF community and network to support scale-up of promising solutions. • Providing advice and support on finding the appropriate methodological means to evaluate their solutions, impact on beneficiaries, and potential scale pathways. • Supporting organisations to develop research questions and testing plans, and overseeing testing process to ensure organisations achieve the desired results to build on their programme design and scale strategies, including: • Research design, quantitative & qualitative data analysis, insights generation, synthesis and reporting. • Leading monitoring and reporting from grantees, including supporting child development and learning outcome assessments, tracking progress toward scale, and synthesising data into periodic reports for internal decision-making and funder reporting. • Supporting organisations with data-led insights for iterative & adaptive learning • Using periodic feedback for improving programme design. • Gathering data from organisations and developing various evidence and knowledge products and collaborating with internal GSF teams on diffusing evidence to the wider education community. Person Specification • A good understanding of K–12 education and early childhood education and care (ECEC), including childcare systems preferably in -LMIC contexts • Extensive project management experience, with a clear track record of delivery to timelines and pre-agreed results. • Ability to manage multiple external stakeholders independently, working with senior teams. • Skilled at synthesising and communicating complex ideas and evidence in accessible formats tailored to diverse audiences (e.g. practitioners, funders, policymakers). • Strong learning design and facilitation skills, with the ability to create interactive and engaging learning materials. • Practical experience designing theories of change and associated monitoring, evaluation and learning frameworks. • Practical experience designing and implementing evaluations, including choosing the right-fit evaluation research design, determining appropriate sample sizes, evaluating the quality and appropriateness of data collection tools, and analysing data. • Knowledge of both quantitative and qualitative methods. • Familiarity with evaluation methodologies appropriate for education innovations (i.e. agile evaluation, implementation research) and longitudinal studies. • Practical experience designing appropriate research questions and using data to inform shifts in organisational strategy and documenting learnings. • Familiarity with education metrics, (esp. child development and learning outcomes), and costing. • Previous experience providing technical support or coaching in MEL. • Advanced Excel skills (data cleaning, formulas, pivot tables and visualisation). • Experience developing and maintaining data management and reporting systems (including dashboards in Excel), with strong documentation and data quality assurance to support KPIs, project performance and other organisational data needs. • Strong capability in survey design, administration and analysis (including online survey tools such as Type forms, Qualtrics, or similar). • Experience with basic statistical or data analysis software (e.g., R, Stata, SPSS) or a demonstrated aptitude to learn. • Ability to produce concise, data-driven reports, fact sheets and visual outputs tailored to different audiences. • Excellent attention to detail and data accuracy when working across multiple projects and data sources. • Strong collaboration and relationship-building skills, including supporting programme teams to strengthen MEL practice. • Ability to prioritise and manage multiple tasks independently in a fast-moving environment. Personal characteristics • Proactivity and solution orientation – You are a self-starter, able to work independently and show initiative in identifying areas for improvement and implementing solutions. • Planning and organising – You have strong planning and time management skills with the ability to effectively manage multiple priorities and stakeholders. • Attention-to-detail – You are someone who prides yourself on getting the details right, with experience of managing high-volume workloads, without compromising on quality and accuracy. • Strong interpersonal skills – You can build, maintain, and manage productive relationships with diverse stakeholders. • Tech literacy – You are proficient in working with the Microsoft 365 suite and other platforms and tools that make remote work possible. You will have excellent Excel skills • Flexibility - You’ll be comfortable working in a young, fully remote organisation. You are quick to adapt to changes in priorities and tasks. • Communication – You have excellent written and oral communication skills, and experience communicating effectively with a range of audiences in a range of formats. • Collaborative team player – You value others’ ideas, skills, perspectives and contributions and work actively to share ideas and support with colleagues. • Commitment to continuous improvement – you are committed to actively developing and sharing your knowledge and skills, to seeking and applying feedback and to sharing feedback with others. • Honesty and transparency – you share information and updates in a clear and transparent way, when things are going to plan and when they aren’t. • Intentionally inclusive – You are committed to understanding, respecting and collaborating with colleagues from a wide range of backgrounds and experience levels. • Passion and motivation - You’ll be passionate about education and making a difference, with a strong work ethic and willingness to get stuck in. Terms and Conditions • Salary: £23,500 - £41,250 per annum. GSF uses location-based salary bands to ensure fair and equitable pay across regions, and the final salary will be dependent on your location with regional cost–of –living adjustments applied. • Contract: Two-year fixed term with possibility of extension. • Hours: Full Time, typically 9-5 in your time zone, but with significant flexibility. Given that we work across different time zones, some non-traditional hours for early or late calls may be required. • Location: We are a fully remote organisation. We welcome applications from the UK where we are headquartered and the global south where we operate, with a preference for a time zone between GMT-2 to GMT+5:30. Local work authorisation in your place of residence is required. Some international travel may be required. For this role, candidates who work in East Africa or are prepared to relocate or to travel extensively to the region will be given priority. • Anticipated Start Date: As soon as possible, subject to any notice periods. • Responsible to: Senior Manager Our Benefits Include • 35 fully flexible holiday days (including flexible national holidays) • Flexible working - work from home or at a location that suits you and at the times that work best for you • Co-working space allowance • Personal learning and development budget • Access to GSF events • Access to Learning Platform iHasco • Annual team retreat • Employee pension scheme How To Apply Application deadline: 26 January 2026, 9am GMT. You will need to upload your CV and a cover letter detailing: • How would you apply your experience working to support innovators to this role? • How would you apply your experience in evaluation to the requirements of this role? Please note, we will not consider any applications unless they include a CV, cover letter and response to the points above, and/or if they have not been submitted through our application portal. Recruitment Process • Shortlisted candidates will be contacted shortly after the deadline to submit a written assessment • First-round interviews: Mar 4th and 5th • Second-round interviews Mar 11th and 12th If you apply, we will process your personal data for recruitment purposes only and in accordance with our Privacy Policy. GSF is committed to cultivating a fair and inclusive workplace, where everyone can be themselves and thrive. We welcome applications from everyone regardless of race, age, disability, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation or faith.