Every school, trust and college estate exists to serve the people who learn and work inside it, and the question that matters most is whether it can support what the organisation wants to achieve for its children and staff. That question now sits inside a published framework. Every Responsible Body (the trust, governing body, local authority, or proprietor accountable for the estate) works within the direction the Education Estates Strategy sets, and that direction is evidence. From autumn 2028, capital maintenance funding follows evidence rather than full bids, and the organisations holding current, reliable information about their estates will be the ones positioned to benefit. Run strategically, an estate also costs less to operate, takes less of its leaders' time, unlocks funding it would otherwise miss, and can earn its keep from the space it holds. Many organisations believe their estate is already well managed, and many are right. Fewer can answer the harder question: how do we know, and could we evidence it if challenged? Most organisations take advice on their estate separately: governance from one adviser, the way the organisation is set up to manage its estate from another, people and training from a third, compliance from a system, condition from a surveyor, none of them able to see the others' work. Whether all of it adds up is the question none of them is asked.
The Estates Strategy Partnership helps schools and colleges run their estates safely and well, so the estate supports what the organisation wants to achieve for its children and staff rather than holding it back. Estate management is several connected things at once, and when separate advisers each take a piece, the joins between them get missed. The partnership was built to see the whole picture, with named practitioners who also do the work.
The only partnership that combines named practitioners across every domain of estate management, from governance to building fabric, with a purpose-built estate management platform.
The platform behind that claim is EstatesBase.
EstatesBase is built around the four foundation documents of the DfE framework: the Education Estates Strategy, the Estate Management Standards, Good Estate Management for Schools, and the Estate Management Competency Framework. It was designed around them from the outset, not configured to support them after the fact, and the partnership maintains its work against the full canon of published DfE guidance as that canon grows. No other platform in the sector makes that claim with the same foundation.
Whatever systems your organisation already runs, the partnership works with them. You can keep what you have, choose something different, or use ours: the advice is the same either way.
The partnership is led by Julie Lawson, a Chartered Manager and former multi-academy trust Chief Operating Officer, with Mel Stokes, a governance specialist and founder of Legacy Governance Solutions; Richard Bunting, founder of Compliance Pod and of EstatesBase, the platform behind the partnership. Together with the member practices that deliver under the partnership's banner, their work spans academy trust, maintained school, local authority and college contexts across England.
There are three ways to begin, and each leads on naturally to the same support, with no obligation to continue.
Practical estates education for the people who carry the estate: what good estate management looks like, grounded in the five connected domains of estate management and the DfE framework, taught by practitioners who also do the work. Taking a place asks nothing of you first and commits you to nothing after.
A small set of engagements with a fixed scope, each producing something immediately useful without creating new work in your schools: a readiness check for the first annual return, help commissioning a condition survey well, a short health check across the whole estate, or a focused review of what the estate costs to run. Each stands on its own, and none commits you to more. Each goes deeper than a self-completed checklist: it works from your documents and your evidence, and says what they would stand up to.
The partnership convenes and joins briefings, roundtables and listening circles through trusted networks and established forums. Nothing is sold in the room: it is where good conversations start.
Beneath the three ways to begin sits a visible menu of nine areas of support, from the documents that run the estate to condition, governance, funding and people, any of which a Responsible Body can procure on its own, in any order, with or without the staged pathway. What We Do shows the shape of it. Services and Support carries the detail.
Every child deserves a learning environment that supports their success: a place that is safe, inclusive, inspiring and built for belonging. The estate is one of the largest strategic assets an education organisation holds, and it should support your ambitions rather than hold them back. This is why we exist.
The Education Estates Strategy is published: a ten-year plan for the school and college estate, asking Responsible Bodies to hold and share condition data to a common standard so that the evidence informing funding decisions is consistent and comparable.
The Further Education Estate Management Standards are published for college corporations, describing maturity progression rather than a checklist to complete.
The first annual return under the School Estate Management Standards. It reaches school responsible bodies and sixth form colleges, is light-touch and self-declared with no documents attached, and the DfE has said it does not affect the funding an organisation receives. What stands behind each answer is the Responsible Body's own evidence, which is why the question worth asking is not what to declare but what you could show.
A new programme replaces the Condition Improvement Fund, so that eligible Responsible Bodies no longer submit full bids for capital maintenance funding. The readiness that matters is current condition data and a working evidence base, and it can be built now.
The partnership's practitioners write under their own names about what good estate management looks like. Read the latest, or browse everything the partnership teaches and publishes.
By Richard Bunting | Founder, Compliance Pod. Compliance infrastructure, The Estates Strategy Partnership.
The DfE Education Estates Strategy shifts accountability for estate management from an operational question to a leadership governance question that most responsible bodies have not yet answered.
By Mel Stokes | Governance lead, The Estates Strategy Partnership. Founder, Legacy Governance Solutions.
Four documents now define what responsible bodies in England must know, do, and demonstrate about their estate, and understanding the relationship between them is a board-level governance requirement.
By Julie Lawson | Lead partner, The Estates Strategy Partnership. Chartered Manager.
Knowing your maturity level and being able to demonstrate assurance at that level are two different things, and the gap between them is widest at Level 2, where it is most consistently underestimated.
If something here fits, that is a good place to start. If you are not sure what fits, that is exactly what the introductory conversation is for: fifteen or thirty minutes, with no charge and a clear next step at the end, even if that step is nothing at all this year.
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