Statutory compliance and evidence
Every statutory obligation as a scheduled task with an owning group, a due date and the evidence its completion has to produce, building the record as the work is done.
The estate operating system for education, built around the DfE framework.
Software your site team will actually use. Evidence your board can rely on.
Watch one task become evidence
A weekly fire alarm test falls due. It is already on the caretaker's list, with its site, its due date and the call point the system has picked for this week. The caretaker runs the test, records the result and takes the photo inside the task. A statutory task cannot be completed without its evidence, and any exception an administrator records is flagged as a gap, so the record is never a bare tick. In the office, the site manager sees the test in the record with its photo, and the site's fire safety position reads from it. The record builds as the work is done.
The task
The completion
The evidence
The position
The task
On the caretaker's list, with its site, its due date and the call point due this week
The completion
The result and the photo recorded inside the task; a statutory task is not complete without its evidence, and any exception is flagged as a gap
The record
The evidence held field by field, with the photo attached
The position
The site's compliance position reads from it, stream by stream
| Module | What it does |
|---|---|
| The task | On the caretaker's list, with its site, its due date and the call point due this week |
| The completion | The result and the photo recorded inside the task; a statutory task is not complete without its evidence, and any exception is flagged as a gap |
| The record | The evidence held field by field, with the photo attached |
| The position | The site's compliance position reads from it, stream by stream |
EstatesBase
My tasks
Completed
Evidence
Task list
Search
Task
Owner
Risk
Scheduled
Weekly fire alarm call point test
Site manager
Statutory
Today
Monthly emergency light flick test
Site manager
Statutory
Fri
Water temperature checks
Caretaker
Statutory
Mon
External door repair
Contractor
Routine
Next week
Roof inspection follow-up
Estates lead
High
Overdue
What the platform holds, and why it is built the way it is
EstatesBase holds an education estate as one working record. The nine areas below are views onto that record, not separate products. Underneath them is a platform built around the DfE framework and configured to your own estate, so the compliance position, the condition data and the asset register are one record, not three systems stitched together later.
Risk and safety management
Incidents and near misses reported from any phone, risk assessments on a five by five matrix with approval routed by score, inspections, and the health and safety position live for each person's area.
Asset, condition and maintenance
The asset register, condition on the DfE scale, every fault and request in one managed pipeline, planned maintenance on the same engine as compliance, a board-governed maintenance plan, and contractors vetted, engaged and closed on the record.
People and capability
Tasks assigned to named groups, competence checked at assignment against the DfE competency framework, CPD plans linked to the gaps, site access clearance on the DBS model, and role and scope set separately and enforced in the data.
Insight and reporting
The annual return as a year-round cycle with a live readiness indicator against the DfE's 28 questions, an evidence pack assembled from the operational record with every file hashed, maturity held as evidenced and configured, and reports on the twelve streams and the five estate domains.
Governance and board assurance
A board assurance view derived from what has been done, attested by the Named Individual before the board reads it, with sign-off as an immutable record, a governance register, a gap register that cannot be quietly cleared, and the standards-mandated approvals preloaded.
Sustainability and net zero
Energy and water from structured meter readings, the Climate Action Plan as a board-signed document broken into tracked actions with its trajectory against actual consumption, the adaptation plan, a named sustainability lead, and a distinct sustainability section in the board's view.
Projects and investment planning
The Estate Strategy, the Asset Management Plan and the budget plan as governed documents linked to the operational records that deliver them, whole-life cost appraisals on significant capital decisions, CDM client duties tracked from the day a project is identified, and an evidence pack for funding cases.
Set-up, access and data
Guided from first login to operating, gaps tracked in a register rather than blocking, existing history imported and marked as migrated, one notification engine with in-app, email and Teams, optional single sign-on, and one organisation's data never visible to another.
Built around the framework, configured to your estate
Derived from the framework, not a generic checklist. The platform ships with 125 compliance tasks across 28 obligation families, derived from the DfE framework and current law. Each task carries its legal basis, the minimum frequency its legal basis or the approved guidance sets, and the evidence its completion has to produce, and every obligation shows the authority it comes from. The platform is kept current against the wider canon of published DfE guidance as it grows.
Configured to your estate. One system serves a single school and a large multi-academy trust, on a structure of organisation, cluster, site and building with the levels you do not use kept out of sight. What a person can do and which sites they see are set separately. At set-up, a set of questions about the estate switches on the obligations that apply, each question showing which tasks a yes activates, and the schedule runs whether or not an asset register has been loaded yet.
Condition data that becomes operational. A condition survey does not stay a filed PDF. Import a surveyor's report, or assess findings in-house, and each finding becomes a managed work item with its grade, cost and priority, on the DfE's elemental structure and A to D scale, with every inspection kept as a dated record so condition is tracked over time. Findings link to the actions in the Asset Management Plan, and significant capital decisions carry a whole-life cost appraisal.
Compliance and maintenance on one spine. The same 28 obligation families roll up into twelve compliance streams on every dashboard, register and evidence surface, and the same spine classifies the planned maintenance tasks, the asset catalogue, the reactive requests, contractor work and the board's compliance position. The whole estate reads through one set of headings, and every site rolls up the same way.
EstatesBase was designed with the people who run education estates, by a team that has delivered compliance to schools, trusts and colleges for fifteen years, and shown to trusts and colleges as it was built.
The framework has a calendar
From autumn 2026, the Responsible Bodies that are eligible for annual capital funding from the Department for Education (trusts, local authorities, sixth form colleges and dioceses) are asked to make a light touch annual return, setting out their position against the School Estate Management Standards (Education Estates Strategy, Department for Education, February 2026). The return is multiple choice, asks for no supporting documents, and the department's guidance on the return states that it does not affect the funding an organisation receives.
The larger change comes later. From autumn 2028 a new programme replaces the Condition Improvement Fund, so that eligible Responsible Bodies no longer submit full bids for capital maintenance funding; the department says the change rests on Responsible Bodies collecting their own estate data to common standards and sharing it. Capital funding follows evidence from autumn 2028, and the organisations holding current condition data and a working evidence base are positioned to benefit. Compliance is where most organisations start, because it is the duty in front of them. The funding case is why the record matters strategically.
EstatesBase holds that record as a working record. The compliance position, the condition data and the asset register accumulate from the tasks people complete, and the annual return's questions are read against those records rather than answered from memory. Your organisation enters its return in the DfE's portal; the records behind each answer are held here, gaps included. How the platform maps to the framework, date by date, is on the DfE framework page.
The partnership
EstatesBase and The Estates Strategy Partnership are two parts of one estates capability. The partnership advises on governance, capability and how the estate function is organised and run. EstatesBase is where the estate is recorded, managed and its evidence held. Each is complete on its own, and used together they compound, because the advice and the platform rest on the same reading of what the DfE framework requires.
The partnership's free Initial Consultation, about an hour across the five connected domains of estate management, is included with every EstatesBase implementation, and stands on its own whether or not anything further follows.
Julie Lawson
Lead partner, The Estates Strategy Partnership
Julie Lawson is lead partner of The Estates Strategy Partnership and the voice of the partnership. A Chartered Manager, she has served as a trust-wide business and compliance lead and then as Chief Operating Officer within multi-academy trusts, leading governance compliance, health and safety, risk management and the delivery of major capital and estates programmes across complex multi-site structures.
The question I was asked most often as a Chief Operating Officer was not whether the estate was compliant but whether we could show it. The record EstatesBase keeps is built to answer that, and the partnership's work starts from the same place: what the board needs to know, and what the evidence behind it has to be.
The full rate card is published, with what it includes and what it does not, on the Pricing page.
The next step
Book a Consultation: see EstatesBase working, from a site team phone to the board view, and talk through how it would work in your organisation.