The conversation follows a familiar pattern. An operations manager or trust business director sits across the table and describes their estates team with genuine confidence. They name individuals by role, talk through years of service, point to training certificates completed. When I ask whether the team has been mapped against the DfE Estate Management Competency Framework, the answer is almost always some version of no. Not a defensive no. A genuinely surprised one.
In my work with trusts on estates capability development, I have found that the competency framework is consistently the least engaged of the four DfE source documents. Most organisations have spent time with the Estate Management Standards. Many have worked through GEMS. A good number have begun to engage with the Estates Strategy published in February 2026. The competency framework sits alongside all of these, and most organisations have not opened it in any structured way.
That is not because the framework is obscure or particularly difficult to understand. It is because what it asks of an organisation is harder to act on than a task list. Updating a fire log or scheduling an annual inspection sits inside an existing maintenance workflow. Mapping your premises manager against a set of competency descriptors for strategic estate management, and then deciding what to do about the gaps, requires a different category of organisational effort.
What the Framework Actually Covers
The framework identifies seven estate management functions: strategic management, planning and resource organisation, understanding your land and buildings, performance management and sustainability, health and safety and compliance, maintaining the estate, and managing estate projects. Within each function, it describes activities and the skills required to carry them out, mapped across four competency levels from operative through to strategic.
The four levels reflect the reality that responsibility for the estate is distributed across an organisation at different points. An operative carries out defined site tasks. A supervisor coordinates and ensures those tasks happen reliably. A manager plans, reports, and exercises independent judgement about estates matters. A strategic lead translates the organisation's educational objectives into estate decisions and is accountable to the board for doing so.
What the framework makes visible is that competent estate management is not a single-role function. It is a capability that is distributed across the organisation and that has to be developed at each level for the whole system to work. A strong premises manager operating without informed board-level oversight of estate risk is not a competently managed estate. A board that receives estate reports without anyone on the senior team able to interrogate them properly is not a competently managed estate either.
Why the Gap Is Consistently Larger Than Organisations Expect
Organisations preparing for assurance tend to discover the same pattern when they map their teams against the framework. The operative and supervisor levels are usually reasonably covered. Someone is doing the day-to-day site tasks, and there is normally someone coordinating them. The gap becomes visible at manager level and widens sharply at the strategic level.
At manager level, the framework expects the ability to develop and maintain an asset management plan, manage estate projects with robust governance, and report meaningfully to senior leadership. In many organisations, this sits with a business manager or school business professional who is managing the estates function alongside a wide range of other responsibilities. The estates management component of their role has grown over time without the competency development that should accompany it.
At the strategic level, the picture is more complex. The framework expects someone to translate organisational objectives into estate strategy, to oversee board-level accountability for the estate, and to lead engagement between the estates function and senior leadership. In many trusts, particularly those that have grown through expansion or merger, this function is either absent, distributed across roles that do not connect well, or absorbed into a senior leadership role without the estate-specific knowledge to carry it properly.
Why Experience Alone Does Not Close the Gap
The objection I hear most often at this point is that the team is experienced. Ten years in post. They know the buildings, they know the contractors, they know what needs doing and when. That is real and it matters. It is also not the same thing as organisational competency mapped against the framework.
Individual experience accumulates through the tasks an individual has actually done in the roles they have held. The competency framework asks a different question: does the organisation have, distributed across its estates function, the full range of activities and skills the framework identifies at each level? An experienced premises manager who has never been required to produce formal board-level estate reports does not hold the strategic reporting competency the framework expects, however competent they are in every other respect.
The framework also covers territory that sits above the traditional premises role: strategic estate management, engagement with senior leadership and governing bodies, performance management at an organisational level, and the governance of estate projects. These are not premises tasks. They are organisational functions. In many education settings, nobody owns them explicitly. They happen partially, or not at all.
What Building Organisational Competency Actually Requires
Most conversations about estates team development focus on individual training. A NEBOSH qualification here, a COSHH refresher there. Training is part of the answer but it is not the whole answer, and in many cases it is not where to start.
Building organisational competency against the framework begins with mapping. You need to understand, at each of the four levels, which activities the framework expects and which skills it requires. Then you need to map your current people against those expectations honestly. Not against job titles, which often tell you very little, and not against training completed, which tells you what someone has attended but not what the organisation can do. Against the actual activities and skills the framework describes.
The gaps that emerge from that mapping exercise usually fall into three categories. The first is individual development gaps, where a person in post does not yet hold the skills the framework expects at their level. The second is structural gaps, where the organisation does not have the role or the capacity to carry a function the framework requires at all. The third is accountability gaps, where the activity happens somewhere in the organisation but nobody is clearly responsible for it and nobody is reporting on it.
Individual development gaps can be addressed through training, mentoring, and structured role development. Structural and accountability gaps cannot. Addressing those requires decisions about how the estates function is organised, what authority it has, how it connects to senior leadership, and how it reports to the board. Those decisions sit with the responsible body. They cannot be delegated to the premises team.
The Question the Framework Is Really Asking
The Estate Management Competency Framework is, at its core, asking a governance question. Not whether you have a trained premises manager, though you need one. Whether the organisation has designed an estates function that can actually do what the framework requires across all four levels.
That means thinking about the estates function as an organisational system rather than as a collection of individuals. It means deciding who is responsible for strategic estate management and whether they have the authority and the information to do it. It means examining how the board receives assurance about the estate and whether the route from the estates team to the governing body is clear and well-designed.
The organisations that make real progress against the competency framework are not the ones that send more people on courses. They are the ones that look at the framework and ask whether their estates function is built to do what it describes. For many trusts, the honest answer to that question is the beginning of a different kind of work.
Julie Lawson is a founding partner of The Estates Strategy Partnership. She works with schools and trusts on people capability, assurance preparation, and operational governance across Domains 4 and 5 of the estate management framework.