The partnership
The Estates Strategy Partnership brings together three practitioners, each with deep domain expertise, working as an integrated partnership across the full range of estate management challenges that education organisations now face. The work spans five connected domains of estate management that, in practice, are not separate problems but parts of the same problem.
This page sets out who those practitioners are and the professional experience they bring.
The founding partners of The Estates Strategy Partnership are introduced below, with their professional backgrounds and the domains they lead within the partnership.
Richard Bunting
Leads Domain 3 (Compliance Infrastructure). Co-leads Domain 2 (Operating Model Design).
Richard Bunting is the founder of Compliance Pod and the architect of the Education Compliance Framework: a structured model of more than 700 statutory, best-practice, and PPM tasks built in direct collaboration with MATs, maintained school trusts, and further education providers across England. He co-founded Results Squared in 2006 and spent eleven years building it into a leading EdTech business, culminating in its acquisition by IRIS Software Group in 2017. After three years on the IRIS senior leadership team, including as Commercial Director for M&A Integration, he founded Compliance Pod in 2020.
That two-decade body of work established the operational knowledge base. EstatesBase is what that knowledge, combined with the requirements of the four DfE source documents, made possible. Compliance Pod continues in operation. EstatesBase is not a rebranded or extended version of Compliance Pod. It is a new platform, built from the ground up. Within the Partnership, Richard leads Domain 3 (Compliance Infrastructure) and co-leads Domain 2 (Operating Model Design).
Julie Lawson
Leads Domain 4 (People and Capability) and Domain 5 (Assurance and Sustainability). Co-leads Domain 2 (Operating Model Design).
Julie Lawson is a Chartered Manager with Executive Team experience across both the private and education sectors. Before moving into education, she worked for many years in operations and logistics, leading major infrastructure programmes including flood relief and bypass development schemes across the north of England.
She has held senior strategic roles within large multi-site education organisations, serving as a trust-wide business and compliance lead and subsequently as Chief Operating Officer. In those roles she led governance compliance, health and safety, risk management, and the delivery of major capital and estates programmes across complex multi-site structures.
She is the founder of Education Compliance Solutions, through which she supports schools, academies, and trusts to strengthen compliance, design operating models, and build assurance structures aligned with the DfE Education Estates Strategy. She holds a water-literate accredited credential and serves voluntarily on the Board of The Heart of Yorkshire Education Group.
Within the Partnership, Julie leads Domain 4 (People and Capability) and Domain 5 (Assurance and Sustainability), and co-leads Domain 2 (Operating Model Design).
Mel Stokes
Leads Domain 1 (Governance Architecture).
Mel Stokes is the Director of Legacy Governance Solutions, with deep experience in designing and strengthening governance architecture across schools, trusts, and multi-academy trusts. She has conducted External Reviews of Governance and strategic governance strategy training for a range of education organisations, providing the structured, evidence-based insight needed for boards and responsible bodies to understand where authority, accountability, and escalation are functioning well, and where design weaknesses are undermining them.
Her professional practice spans complaints resolution, governance capacity building, and targeted structural improvement work with governing boards, clerking teams, and senior leadership teams. She is an active contributor to national and regional governance networks, supporting the continued professionalisation of governance and clerking across the sector.
Within the Partnership, Mel leads Domain 1 (Governance Architecture). Her contribution to the Partnership is grounded in a consistent finding across the sector: most estate-related governance failures are not failures of compliance but failures of design. Effective governance architecture is not a response to problems but the foundation that prevents them, connecting strategic oversight and long-term planning to the day-to-day operations that determine whether an estate is genuinely well managed or simply reactive.
Working with the partnership
The Estates Strategy Partnership is designed for integration: each partner brings domain expertise that connects with the work of the others, and the intellectual programme that runs across the partnership reflects that. The Insights programme and the advisory work it supports are grounded in the direct sector experience of the founding partners, developed across governance, operating model, people, compliance, and assurance work with education organisations of different types and at different stages of maturity.
Practitioners considering the partnership as a vehicle for referral or involvement bring their own professional network and their own domain depth. The work of the partnership is not a single-domain practice, and the conversations that arise from it frequently require more than one perspective. Practitioners who have developed deep expertise in areas such as governance, estates strategy, people development, or assurance, and who work regularly with schools, trusts, or other education organisations, will recognise the territory.
Practitioners who believe their domain expertise and professional network would add value to the partnership model are warmly encouraged to open that conversation.
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