About The Education Alliance The Education Alliance (TEA) is a non-profit organization that warmly welcomes all those who share our passion for providing high-quality education to every child in India. Headquartered in Delhi, we are committed to promoting access to learning-ready schools to ensure that all children in India have equitable access to quality education. We support state education departments by deploying highly qualified teams that work with state and non-state actors to co-create solutions to improve the quality of education in government schools.

We currently operate in six states (Delhi, Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, Gujarat and Uttarakhand) and are proud to have a dedicated team of 50+ young professionals.

Why TEA?

- Drive meaningful change in the education system by contributing to large-scale, statewide reform projects.
- Collaborate closely with top government leaders, including ministers and IAS officers, shaping the future of education in India.
- Work in a certified Great Place To Work® that values positivity, purpose, and people.
- Benefit from progressive policies that prioritize well-being, flexibility, and professional development.
- Build a fulfilling career with opportunities for growth, learning, and impact in the not-for-profit sector.
- Live our core values: Build Together, Rise Above, Take Charge, and Chase Perfection.

Who are we looking for? We are seeking a Senior Program Manager to lead TEA's District Program Management Unit (DPMU) in Dewas, Madhya Pradesh. This is a leadership role with full ownership of the district's foundational learning agenda across approximately 1,400 government schools. You will:

1. Lead a district team of Academic Mentors and a Program Manager, setting direction, building their capability and holding the team to a high bar on quality.
2. Own the district strategy for improving foundational literacy and numeracy outcomes, translating state priorities and assessment evidence into a quarterly academic plan that teachers and mentors can actually run.
3. Build and hold relationships with the district administration, including the Collector, CEO Zila Panchayat, DPC, APC and DIET, so that the programme's priorities become the district's priorities.
4. Strengthen the government's own academic mentoring cadre of CACs, BACs and BRCCs, so that support to teachers continues beyond our presence.
5. Use assessment and classroom data rigorously to diagnose where children are stuck, decide what to do about it, and change course when the evidence says so.
6. Be a solid fit for both the role and the culture of our organization, which our rigorous recruitment process is designed to establish.

Joining TEA is an exciting opportunity to make a meaningful and long-lasting impact in education.

About Mission Ankur

Mission Ankur is the flagship initiative aimed at enhancing foundational literacy and numeracy (FLN) outcomes for students in grades 1-3 in Madhya Pradesh. Under the broader framework of the NIPUN Bharat Mission (2021-27), TEA worked with the Rajya Shiksha Kendra, Madhya Pradesh as the State Project Management Unit (SPMU) for Mission Ankur from 2019 - 2026. Alongside this, TEA runs a District PMU in Dewas to drive mission implementation with surgical precision on ground, working directly with schools, teachers and the district administration to demonstrate what is possible at district scale.

About the Role





Position Summary The Senior Program Manager heads the Dewas DPMU and is accountable for the district's foundational learning outcomes. The role combines programme strategy, team leadership, government partnership and on-ground execution. You will lead a team of Academic Mentors and a Program Manager working across a tiered model of high-touch and medium-touch schools, drawn from approximately 1,400 FLN schools in the district, and you will be judged on whether children's learning levels move.

Program Strategy and Design

- Own the district's annual and quarterly academic plans, built on assessment evidence, and translate them into what teachers, mentors and block officials will actually do.
- Diagnose problems from first principles before deciding on solutions, including root cause analysis, so that effort goes to the constraint rather than the symptom.
- Design and refine the district model, including the segmentation of schools, the coaching approach and the mentor support design, and define in advance how you will know an approach is not working.
- Bring field realities into design decisions, and carry district learnings back to the state team to inform wider practice.
- Stay in the field: visit schools continuously and meet your own visit targets, generating first-hand insight into how coaching works and what teachers and students need, and feed that back into design.

Team Leadership and Development

- Lead, manage and develop a team of Academic Mentors and a Program Manager, including goal setting, review, feedback and performance conversations.
- Build the team's capability in structured pedagogy, coaching, data use and stakeholder engagement, and create space for the team to lead their own workstreams.
- Map team members' interest areas, current capacities and growth areas, and allocate work accordingly.
- Set the standard on quality beyond compliance, and build a collaborative culture where outputs are shared, challenged and improved together.

Government and Stakeholder Management

- Build and sustain trust-based relationships with the district administration, including the Collector, CEO Zila Panchayat, DPC, APC, DEO and DIET, and with block and cluster officials.
- Drive the district and block review meeting rhythm, bringing data to the table, securing decisions and following up on them.
- Navigate transfers, vacancies and shifting priorities without losing programme momentum, escalating constraints the district can resolve and planning around those it cannot.
- Represent TEA with funders and partners in the district, and participate in programme reviews and step-backs.

Strengthening the Mentoring Cadre

- Build the capability of the government's academic mentoring cadre, including CACs, BACs and BRCCs, through orientations, joint school visits and structured debriefs.
- Work towards mentoring visits that change classroom practice rather than only being recorded, and support the district in making that shift.
- Ensure accurate data entry and honest reporting on departmental platforms, so that real improvement can be seen.

Data, Evidence and Monitoring

- Analyse and Interpret student assessment data, classroom observation data and mentor visit data to identify patterns,



diagnose gaps and decide next steps.
- Set and track district targets for learning outcomes, and build simple tracking systems that the team and the district can use.
- Apply monitoring and evaluation rubrics to test whether interventions are working, and recommend changes based on what the evidence shows.

Communication, Documentation and Reporting

- Produce high-quality reports, decks and reflections for internal, funder and government audiences, structuring data into a narrative that different stakeholders can follow and act on.
- Document approaches, learnings and challenges so that the district model can be replicated elsewhere.
- Communicate with clarity across very different audiences, from a Grade 2 teacher to a District Collector.

Skills and Qualifications

- Education: Postgraduate degree in Education, Public Policy, Social Sciences, Management or a related field.
- Experience:
- Minimum 4 years of relevant work experience, including at least 1 to 2 years of experience managing a district/block/state PMU team.
- Experience of on-ground project implementation, preferably in the public education sector or with government systems.
- Experience of working with district or state-level government stakeholders is strongly preferred.
- Familiarity with foundational literacy and numeracy, structured pedagogy or teacher capacity building is strongly preferred.
- Skills:
- Strong analytical and quantitative skills, with the ability to work with assessment and programme data and draw actionable conclusions.
- Structured thinking and problem solving, including the ability to break a complex problem into logical steps and identify the right metric to solve for.
- Solid people skills, including the ability to build relationships, manage up and across, work with a wide range of stakeholders and develop a team.
- Excellent written and oral communication, including documentation, reporting and presentation skills, and the ability to adapt the message to the audience.
- Planning and prioritization, including the ability to think through the micro activities needed to achieve a goal and to judge the relative importance of competing priorities.
- Project management skills, with the ability to hold multiple workstreams and deadlines at once.
- Mindset and Attitude:
- Ownership and accountability, with the ability to deliver quality work with little oversight and take initiative.
- Humility, including the ability to accept and learn from failure, listen actively, seek feedback and operate with a serving mindset.
- Agility and adaptability, including the ability to think on your feet and work through ambiguity, change and a volatile environment.
- Continuous learning, with a consistent focus on building new knowledge and skills and translating learning into action and impact.
- Honesty and integrity, including a realistic view of what is working and what is not.
- Passion for the mission and a sense of urgency about the challenge, with the energy and resilience that sustained field work requires.
- Other Requirements:
- Willingness to be based in Dewas and to travel independently within the district for school visits and stakeholder meetings. Field travel reimbursement on actuals.
- Fluency in Hindi and English, written and spoken. Mandatory.
- Comfort with remote field locations and with the stretch that a district leadership role involves.
- Familiarity with the local context of Dewas, Indore or Madhya Pradesh is strongly preferred.

📌 Senior Program Manager (Dewas)
🏢 The Education Alliance
📍 Dewas