Learning

Everything the partnership teaches and publishes lives here. The partners write under their own names: essays that argue a position from direct sector experience, and practical articles that answer the specific questions estates leads, trust leaders and responsible persons actually ask. Alongside the writing sits the development programme, where the same practitioners teach what good estate management looks like.

Insights. Practitioner essays under named bylines: a considered position, grounded in what the author has seen across the sector, written to remain useful for years. In Practice. Practical articles that answer a specific question about the DfE framework, what good looks like at each maturity level, and what to do when a gap is found. Structured for search; if you arrive from a search result, you are in the right place. The development programme. Practical estates education for trustees, governors, governance professionals, clerks, school business professionals, executive leaders and estates teams, delivered by practitioners who also do the work.

Explore the development programme: practical estates education for trustees, governors, school business professionals and estates teams.

Latest thinking

The latest from the partners.

Insight

What the DfE Estates Strategy Actually Requires, and What It Does Not Say

By Richard Bunting | Founder, Compliance Pod. Compliance infrastructure, The Estates Strategy Partnership.

Estate Strategy Operating Model

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.

Insight

The Four Documents That Now Govern Every Education Estate in England

By Mel Stokes | Governance lead, The Estates Strategy Partnership. Founder, Legacy Governance Solutions.

Governance Compliance

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.

Insight

The School Estate Management Standards: What Each Maturity Level Actually Means

By Julie Lawson | Lead partner, The Estates Strategy Partnership. Chartered Manager.

Assurance Governance

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.

Insight

Why the Operating Model Problem Cannot Be Solved by Software Alone

By Richard Bunting | Founder, Compliance Pod. Compliance infrastructure, The Estates Strategy Partnership.

Operating Model Compliance

The compliance dashboard can be green, the task schedule current, and the certificates stored, and the organisation still unable to give a confident account of where it actually stands.

Insight

Governance Architecture for Estate Management: Where Accountability Has to Start

By Mel Stokes | Governance lead, The Estates Strategy Partnership. Founder, Legacy Governance Solutions.

Governance Operating Model

The finding that recurs most consistently in External Reviews of Governance is not that boards lack interest in their estate: it is that the governance architecture was never designed to support accountability for it.

Insight

How to Diagnose Where Your Organisation Actually Stands Against the Standards

By Richard Bunting | Founder, Compliance Pod. Compliance infrastructure, The Estates Strategy Partnership.

Assurance Estate Strategy

Self-assessed maturity levels are almost always higher than what direct examination of the evidence reveals, because the people who conducted the assessment built the processes they are assessing.

Insights In Practice

Book a Conversation: a short introductory conversation, fifteen or thirty minutes, about where your organisation is and where you want your estate to take it.