Director, Schools at Bridge International Academies

Who We Are

Bridge partners with governments, donors, and parents to ensure that every child has access to an education that develops her full potential and creates the foundation for prosperity for the country. We are dedicated to supporting teachers, empowering school leaders, and ensuring every child has the learning support needed to master the national syllabus and have the confidence to succeed in a competitive world. Each of our project or country teams are supported through expertise and programming from additional offices around the world, combining world-leading expertise in core design areas with locally resident leadership and execution. We leverage experts, data, and technology in order to support and scale every aspect of quality education delivery. Bridge managed and supported schools are technology enabled and data driven to ensure accountability in the classroom for both teachers’ performance and children’s learning. 

The Bridge model delivers significant learning outcomes at large scale by combining technology and customized learning materials. At Bridge, we believe innovation and technology can transform learning. Our model – which uses technology to deliver thoroughly researched and carefully designed daily lesson guides to teachers in our academies – is proven to increase learning outcomes for children. We are a solutions-driven, implementation-focused organization, using design principles to work in varied and often highly constrained contexts to ensure learning outcomes and positive development for children. Working in regional and national scales is important to us, as empowering entire generations of children with core knowledge, skills, and confidence is what builds the foundation for a peaceful and prosperous future for us all. 

Our mission is to provide our pupils with a life-changing education and we believe that every child should have a right to world-class education regardless of her family’s income. Core to our approach is the conviction that every child can learn, as long as the school she attends is committed to her development and puts her needs to learn at the forefront of all decisions. We have seen teachers and children transform and excel in both government and private schools that we support and manage.

We invite you to join this incredible endeavor that is having world-changing impact across multiple continents. You will join a team of dedicated change-makers committed to ensuring that each decision we make keeps a child’s experience of learning as its guiding principle. 

Schools Group

Schools is the heart of Bridge. Schools is responsible for ensuring all of the work created by our expert teams, including Instructional Design, Leadership & Development, Technology, Communications, and Insight, are used in each school, and each school is managed to achieve its goal of ensuring every child enjoys a learning environment that develops her core skills, knowledge and confidence. The performance of the entire organization is led by the Schools Group, which works to strengthen school enrollment and student retention, by ensuring every school is regarded as the strongest school in its neighborhood and delivers on improved learning outcomes for children. Schools is the largest team in the organization, as this Group is responsible for overseeing the day-to-day management of each school. We engage with school leaders and teachers every day, ensuring ongoing professional development, performance management, and intensive coaching. Our investments in instructional design and teachers’ professional development are overseen by the Schools Group, and academics is at the forefront of our school programming. To ensure sustainability, we support effective school-level budgeting and financial management. We are always seeking effective ways of ensuring every school is supported with data-driven practices. We measure our success through increased enrollments in the school, signaling strength in management and community engagement, and by the learning outcomes of the children in the classroom. We are performance driven.

About the Role

The Director, Schools is responsible for the performance management of every school in the territory or program. This includes school management, academic programming, school programming, staff professional development, regulatory compliance, commercial sustainability, and parent and community engagement in every school we support. You have the incredible responsibility for the integrated delivery of all our programming in each school, for each teacher, for each child. 

Consequently, your focus on using data to drive performance, and constant coaching to change behavior, and rigorous implementation of core school programs is critical.  The team you supervise is in schools each day, providing ongoing mentorship, specific performance feedback, and on-going group and personal training. You manage one of the largest teams in the company, led by the field team of School Supervisors that give daily support to each school.

In this role, you also engage with all stakeholders of the schools under your care, including government officials, parents, and community groups as may be required, just as your school supervisors do in the community of each school. 

Instructional leadership is a core part of your remit, ensuring that school leaders and teachers are delivering on our promise to ensure each child has the opportunity to learn, which only happens when each teacher uses the right materials at the right time each day, listening and responding to students’ learning, and is supported by the school leader in this practice daily. 

Your role is the nexus of all that we do, ensuring the implementation and results of our overall programing.  Using big data that provides a visibility into every day teaching practices and school management, you work with your direct supervisory staff to improve performance of each school with the goal of student performance and character development in mind, as well as each school’s financial sustainability – and provide feedback on core programming to our design teams. 

This team is laser focused on outcomes, inherently collaborative in nature, loves fostering leadership in others, is unwaveringly committed to ensuring a quality education for our pupils, and is excited about creating incredible learning interventions that drive positive behavior and mindset change in adults. You will flourish on this team if you are: a team player, hyper-focused on results, flexible in a dynamic environment, and have fun while working hard.

This role reports to the Managing Director and VP Schools.

What You Will Do

• Be responsible for and the success of schools in your territory. Success is defined by (i) achieving excellence in all School Management metrics, (ii) meeting or exceeding ambitious learning outcome targets, (iii) building a culture of community and parent engagement. 
• Ensure each Supervisor delivers on their oversight of schools and individual KPIs. Their schools should deliver the promise of learning and holistic development for children, have a strong and high-performing cohort of teachers, operate within its budget and sustain enrollment necessary for financial sustainability;
• Be responsible for the management of direct reporting lines with Regional Managers (to whom School Supervisors report), L&D Manager, and Academic Manager
• Use data from multiple sources to ensure that academic programming - offerings, lesson quality, teacher support, learning innovation, etc. - throughout the year is robust, adheres to regulatory guidelines, is contextualised to the territory, and leads to outsized learning outcomes for all pupils.
• Use data from multiple sources to ensure Regional Managers, Supervisors are effectively managing their schools, and creating safe learning environments.
• Be in schools 20% time, observing teaching, observing management, and engaging with stakeholders, including government officials, parents, and community groups.
• When observing or holding meetings, use rubrics or other documents to support structured observation and reporting.
• Support specific school events, including collaborating on programming for such events as school opening celebrations, parent teacher conferences and school closing celebrations, as well as community showcases and participation on co-curricular competitions.
• Ensure school strength and support enrollment efforts are achieved. 
• Ensure local regulatory processes are followed, including environmental & social standards, as well as national regulations. 
• Ensure school staff and students are prepared to sit in government-proctored exams, as they may occur on a termly/semester basis, and with particular attention to national examinations. 
• Ensure that leadership & development sessions are delivered to schools during the course of the school year, and during induction training for new staff. Supervisors should use the materials and programming developed by the Leadership & Development team. 
• Work with the Leadership & Development team to provide, facilitate on-going professional development for Supervisors
• Support schools through transition of staff, including of school leaders and teachers; work with local government and other local organizations as needed.
• Ensure school leaders are actively building pipeline of school staff candidates, leveraging parents, local government leadership and other local organizations.
• Ensure schools are working directly with country or regional government leadership, teacher training centers or regional organizations to support sourcing candidates for school staff. 
• Supervise school budget and optimization, prevent fraud and ensure financial discipline.
• Supervisor budget and optimization, prevent fraud and ensure financial discipline among the Schools group

Other duties as assigned

What You Should Have

• Proven experience managing field-based teams
• Proven leadership experience, leading teams of people to accomplish an objective
• Belief in data-driven decision making
• School management experience a plus
• Relentless focus on achievement for yourself and others
• Bias towards action
• Flexible and loves to work in a dynamic environment
• Collaborative leader with strong relationship building skills
• Strong interpersonal skills
• Strong communication skills
• B.Sc or M.A. in Education is preferred

You’re also

A detailed doer – You have a track record of getting things done. You’re organized and responsive. You take ownership of every idea you touch and execute it to a fine level of detail, setting targets, engaging others, and doing whatever it takes to get the job done. You can multi-task dozens of such projects at once and never lose sight of the details. Likely, you have some experience in a start-up or other rapid-growth company.

A creative problem-solver – Growing any business from scratch comes with massive and constant challenges. On top of that, Bridge works in often fragile, sometimes volatile low-resource communities and with complex government systems. You need to be flexible and ready to get everything done effectively, quickly, and affordably with the materials at hand.

A relentless advocate – The children we serve and teachers we empower never leave your mind. You know them, get them, have shared a meal with them (or would be happy to in the future). You would never shrink back from shaking a parent’s hand or picking up a crying child, no matter what the person was wearing or looked like. Every decision you make considers their benefit, experience, and value.

A malleable learner – You believe you can always do better. You welcome constructive criticism and provide it freely to others. You know you only get better tomorrow when others point out where you’ve missed things or failed today.

A data-driven decision-maker – When making decisions, you don’t rely your intuition alone. You collect data, you analyze it and make decisions with clear justifications.

A curious investigator – You ask why a lot. You don’t just take what you see and accept it. You wonder why it is that way, and are aware that the world we see is created by human choices and actions – and it could be different. You wonder, and see the world as wonderful even when you want to change a part of it that is unjust.