What we do
Estate management in education is several jobs at once, and they belong to different people. Accountability for the estate sits with a board. How the organisation is set up to manage its estate over time (its operating model) decides whether that accountability turns into anything. The people who carry the estate need the capability the Estate Management Competency Framework describes. The estate has statutory duties, and evidence that must exist and be current. And the condition of the buildings, and what the organisation can show about all of it, is what a board and the annual return eventually test.
Those things are usually handled separately, by advisers who cannot see each other's work. A governance question becomes a capability question. A capability question becomes an assurance question. An assurance question surfaces at the board and at the annual return. The partnership was designed to see that whole chain, because in the usual arrangement no one is asked to.
Five connected domains of estate management
Governance Architecture.
Where authority for the estate sits, how decisions about it are made and reported, and whether the board receives assurance or simply receives reports. The instruments boards work to now name the estate as board business: the Academy Trust Handbook 2026 for academy trusts, with effect from 1 October 2026, and the governance guides for the maintained sector. Governance that is not designed around how the estate is actually managed will not produce the evidence assurance needs, which is why this domain connects directly to the next. Mel Stokes fronts governance for the partnership. Governance training is an ESP service led by Mel Stokes: governance training for boards, governors and governance professionals on their estate oversight obligations and wider governance responsibilities.
Operating Model Design.
How your organisation is designed to manage its estate over time: who does what, who owns what, where decisions are made, and how the estate's long-term plan connects to the organisation's budget and to its ambitions. This is where governance intent meets operational reality. Without an operating model designed to close a gap, governance commitments and training tend to produce activity rather than improvement. Julie Lawson fronts this domain.
Compliance Infrastructure.
A narrow core of estate duty is statutory: the duty to have competent persons for health and safety, and the specific duties attached to fire, asbestos, water and other named risks. Around that core sit the schedules, records and evidence that show the estate is run consistently and that every duty has a named holder who knows they hold it. A duty with no named holder, or evidence that lives in an inbox, is a compliance gap that surfaces as an assurance problem later. Richard Bunting fronts compliance infrastructure.
People and Capability.
Estates capability is a people question before it is a systems question. The law requires competent persons for health and safety; beyond that narrow core, the framework expects capability to be assessed and developed against the Estate Management Competency Framework, at board level as much as in the estates team. An organisation cannot evidence what its people are not equipped to produce, so this domain feeds the last one directly. Julie Lawson fronts people and capability, with Mel Stokes at board level.
Assurance and Sustainability.
Where the other four domains are tested. The condition of the buildings and what it makes achievable, the evidence behind the annual return, the reporting a board relies on, climate resilience, and readiness for investment. An organisation that has addressed each domain in isolation finds this test harder than it expects, because assurance is only ever a judgement about the whole picture. Julie Lawson fronts assurance and evidence quality; Mel Stokes brings the governance reading of assurance.
Nine areas of support
Beneath the five domains sits a visible menu, organised by what you are trying to do rather than by how the partnership is structured. Each area opens to its services on the Services and Support page. Any of them can be procured on its own, in any order, with or without the staged pathway, and everything in one place, through one relationship, is the point of the partnership rather than a requirement of it.
The visible menu is not the whole of the partnership's range: the partnership delivers or commissions the full range of estate services behind it, scoped through the conversation.
The platform behind the partnership
The advisory work above stands on one shared foundation: a source-referenced register of every evidenceable requirement in the DfE framework, maintained as the published guidance grows, and a platform built on that register.
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.
EstatesBase and the partnership are under common ownership, and we say so plainly. Each stands on its own: EstatesBase sells directly in its own right, and the right system for your organisation is the one that fits it, whether that is ours or not, because the advice does not depend on a platform sale.
Who the partnership works with
The work spans academy trusts, maintained schools and their governing bodies, local authorities as the Responsible Body for the schools they maintain, and further education colleges. The instruments differ. An academy trust works to the Academy Trust Handbook 2026. A maintained school and its local authority work to the maintained schools governance guide. A college corporation works to the Further Education Estate Management Standards, which describe maturity progression rather than a checklist to complete, and the partnership honours that posture in everything it does with a corporation, its principal and its board. Sixth form colleges work to the school standards and are served on that basis. The five domains, and the question of whether the estate supports what the organisation wants for its learners and staff, are the same in every case; the practitioners apply them with awareness of where accountability, named-individual requirements and board approval sit differently in each.
What an engagement leaves behind
Every engagement of substance leaves a documented record: a structured assessment of where your organisation stands, a documented gap register, and an improvement plan. We call that record professional due diligence infrastructure, because it is what the responsible person relies on if the organisation's position is ever questioned. A Responsible Body that can show it knew its obligations, assessed its position against the evidence and planned to close the gaps is in a different position from one that cannot, and the difference is factual rather than rhetorical.