BESA CORNER
This month in our ongoing feature highlighting the work of members of the education suppliers’ trade body BESA, we hear from IRIS Education and Sparrowhawk Communications.
Is your estate ready for the DfE’s first autumn return?
MAND BECKETT, Associate Director, Product Management at IRIS Education, discusses what schools and trusts need to know about school estates management under the DfE’s Education Estates Strategy, and how to prepare for the autumn return.
This autumn, every school and trust responsible for its own buildings faces a new task: submitting the first school estate management standards annual return under the Department for Education’s Education Estates Strategy. The return opened in the third week of September and closes in late November, and it asks each Responsible Body to self-assess against the DfE’s Estate Management Standards, working towards Level 3, ‘fully effective’, through the DfE’s new ‘Manage your education estate’ service.
Published in February 2026, the Education Estates Strategy is a 10-year plan and the biggest change to how schools manage estates, safety, and capital funding in a generation. It replaces reactive ‘patch and mend’ repairs with continuous, evidence-led estate management, and it arrives with real money behind it: £38 billion in capital investment between 2025-26 and 2029-30, rising to almost £3 billion a year for maintenance and renewal by 2034-35, plus close to £20 billion for the School Rebuilding Programme. Against an estimated £13.8 billion maintenance backlog, the strategy is trying to close a genuine gap.
The autumn return is only the first step. From spring 2026, the DfE has been publishing common data standards for how schools and trusts should record and share condition information. Pilots testing full condition data collection run through 2026-27, with national rollout following in autumn 2027. By autumn 2028, the Condition Improvement Fund closes for good, replaced by a funding model built on the estate data schools and trusts have already collected, rather than competitive bids. In other words, the light-touch self-assessment due this autumn is the first of several checkpoints, each one asking for more detail than
the last.
That timeline is where the risk sits for many estates and business managers. Compliance and condition records are still held across spreadsheets, inboxes, and paper files rather than one central system, which makes an audit-ready evidence trail hard to produce at short notice. For MATs, the picture is often harder still: individual schools manage their own compliance independently, leaving trust leaders with no group-wide view of condition or risk until a problem has already surfaced.
Readiness isn’t complicated, but it takes groundwork. It means a current asset register, a documented audit trail for statutory checks, governance reporting that reaches trustees or governors, and estate records structured well enough to support a funding application the moment the evidence-based model opens. Consolidating that information in one system turns it from an annual scramble into business as usual.
To help school and trust leads work through what ‘ready’ actually looks like, IRIS Education has put together a free 12-point checklist: ‘The DfE Estates Strategy: your 2026 readiness checklist’. It walks through the standards, the deadlines between now and 2029-30, and the practical steps to close the gap between where an estate’s records stand today and where the DfE expects them to be, including a real example of a school that used structured condition evidence to secure capital funding.
What to do when your school makes the news for the wrong reasons Comment by JESSICA SHEPHERD, Founder of Sparrowhawk Communications.
The call comes in on a Tuesday afternoon, or a Friday evening if you’re unlucky. A journalist wants a comment. Something has happened, or allegedly happened, and your school is at the centre of it. What you do in the next 24 hours will shape how the story runs.
Crisis communications training rarely makes it onto the CPD calendar. That’s understandable - there are more pressing demands on a leader’s time and it’s easy
to assume you’ll work it out when the moment comes. But you will have less time than you think.
The first thing to understand is that silence is not a neutral act. Declining to comment doesn’t protect you. It hands the journalist a story in which your school refused to engage and it leaves a vacuum that parents, governors and social media will fill with speculation. A holding statement, brief, factual, neither defensive nor confessional, buys you time and signals that you are in control of the situation. You don’t need all the facts to say that you are aware of the matter, that pupil welfare is your priority and that you will provide a further update once you have more information. A good holding statement will show compassion, set out the action being taken, offer reassurance and, where possible, give a concrete example of what is happening on the ground.
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www.education-today.co.uk
Before you speak to any journalist, think about who else needs to hear from you. Staff need a clear internal message before rumour fills the gap. It is also worth thinking in advance about who should front the response and who will draft communications, sign them off and who will be the single point of contact for media enquiries. This can remove a layer of panic when the situation is live.
Social media deserves particular attention. Crises frequently begin there, with a parent post, a screenshot or a thread that gathers comments from across the community. Monitoring what’s being said, and knowing when to respond publicly and when not to, requires judgment that is hard to exercise under pressure. It’s worth thinking through what you would do in advance.
Most journalists are not adversarial. They want a response, a human voice, some empathy for those who have been affected and something they can report accurately. Engaging with them tends to produce better outcomes and can turn a difficult story into a more balanced one. What you communicate after a crisis has passed is crucial. What has changed? What lessons have been learned? All this matters as much to long-term reputation as how you handled the original story. The schools and trusts that recover well from difficult coverage tend to be the ones that engage honestly with what happened, rather than those who hope everyone will simply move on.
When a crisis is handled well, it can strengthen the trust that parents, staff and governors place in your leadership.
October 2026
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