Every child deserves a learning environment that supports their success: a place that is safe, inclusive, inspiring and built for belonging. I have seen first-hand, throughout my career in education and now as lead partner of The Estates Strategy Partnership, how strategic investment in the estate strengthens inclusion, supports SEND, removes barriers to learning and improves outcomes for children and young people.
The estate is far more than the setting for teaching and learning. It is one of the largest strategic assets any education organisation holds, shaping wellbeing, access, curriculum delivery, safety, sustainability and long-term resilience. Climate change is already affecting the environments children learn in, through overheating, flooding and water scarcity. When we treat the estate as a strategic enabler and act on those risks, we protect children now and build the foundations for future generations.
The Estates Strategy Partnership offers schools, trusts and colleges the support and sector expertise to turn that strategic intent into action. By connecting leadership, governance, data, funding and delivery into one clear pathway, we help organisations make confident, evidence-based decisions about their estate. An estate strategy built on evidence is how an organisation saves money, saves time, unlocks funding and creates better environments for children.
Our work is grounded in evidence and shaped by practitioners who understand the realities of school, trust and college leadership from the inside. The estate should support your ambitions rather than hold them back. Whether the question is accessibility, SEND provision, long-term capital planning or climate resilience, the estate is where strategic intent becomes practical action.
The partnership brings governance, operations, compliance, condition and building management expertise together under one banner, to help Responsible Bodies and their leaders understand their position, strengthen assurance, make confident decisions and deliver meaningful change.
This is why we exist. This is why the estate matters. And this is why the future of every school begins with the places children learn.
Julie Lawson, lead partner
The Estates Strategy Partnership is a partnership of named practitioners, with three tiers. The founding partners front its work and carry its standards. Member practices deliver under the partnership's banner where work is secured as the partnership, and each keeps its own identity, its own market presence and its own direct routes to market: membership is an addition to a practice, never a surrender of it. Beyond them sits a specialist network, commissioned and managed on your behalf where an engagement needs a specialism the partnership does not hold itself. Whatever the route, a service offered under the partnership's banner is the partnership's service from end to end, with the named practitioner and their track record surfaced under it.
Legacy Governance Solutions is Mel Stokes's governance practice; her estates-linked governance work delivers under the partnership's banner where it comes through the partnership.
Julie Lawson leads the partnership and speaks for it, leads on people, capability and assurance, and fronts how organisations design the management of their estate over time. Mel Stokes is the governance lead. Richard Bunting fronts compliance infrastructure.
Lead partner
Julie Lawson is lead partner of The Estates Strategy Partnership and the voice of the partnership. A Chartered Manager with executive team experience across the education and private sectors, she has held senior strategic roles within large multi-site education organisations, serving as a trust-wide business and compliance lead and then as Chief Operating Officer within multi-academy trusts. 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. Before moving into education she worked for many years in operations and logistics, leading major infrastructure programmes including flood relief and bypass schemes across the north of England. 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 on people, capability and assurance, and fronts how organisations design the management of their estate over time. She also speaks for the partnership itself. Her starting point is the buyer's own vantage point: as a former Chief Operating Officer she sat where the reader sits, and she writes and advises from what a leadership team was trying to achieve for its children when the estate got in the way.
Governance lead
Mel Stokes is the partnership's governance lead and the founder and director of Legacy Governance Solutions, a member practice of the partnership. Her practice spans governor and trustee training, board and chair development, governance advice, complaints resolution and investigations, assurance frameworks, and system-wide governance capacity building; External Reviews of Governance are one instrument within it. She works with governing boards, clerking teams and senior leadership teams across schools, trusts and multi-academy trusts, and contributes to national and regional governance networks that support the continued professionalisation of governance and clerking.
Within the partnership, Mel fronts governance and leads governance training on estate oversight obligations and wider governance responsibilities. She brings the governance reading to the board's assurance question. Her contribution rests on a consistent finding across the sector: most estate-related governance failures are failures of design rather than of compliance, and well-designed governance is the foundation that prevents problems rather than a response to them.
Compliance infrastructure
Richard Bunting is the founder of Compliance Pod and of EstatesBase, the platform behind the partnership. He has spent more than twenty years building software for education organisations of every type across England, from multi-academy trusts and maintained school trusts to further education providers. Through Compliance Pod, that work established the operational knowledge base for how estates are actually run and evidenced. EstatesBase is what that knowledge, combined with the four foundation documents of the DfE framework, made possible. Compliance Pod continues in operation.
Within the partnership, Richard fronts compliance infrastructure: what evidential records must exist and what gaps look like in practice, and what professional due diligence infrastructure means for the person responsible for the estate.
Profile to follow
Profile to follow
Practices and practitioners who believe their domain expertise and professional network would add value to the partnership model are warmly encouraged to open that conversation.
The partners write under their own names, arguing positions and answering practical questions from direct sector experience.
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.
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