The Department for Education issued its School Estate Management Standards in April 2025. This is the second in a series of blogs focussing on the Level 1 Baseline requirements which all schools are expected to have achieved.
School Estate Management Standards extract regarding budgeting for the school estate:
| Area | Activities |
| Planning and organising your estate resources | · You ensure budget forecasts in respect of estates management are accurate, based on realistic assumptions and reflective of lessons learned from previous years. · The budgeting process and prioritisation of funding for estates management considers existing risk assessments. |
How to Forecast your Estate Budget
Accurate forecasting of your estate budget obviously relies upon having accurate information about the condition of your estate which is why having up-to-date building condition surveys carried out by professional building consultants is so important. Your condition surveys will assist in identifying both capital works and planned preventative maintenance works.
Capital Works
Your building condition survey should rate all elements according to the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors’ building condition rating system (also utilised by the Department for Education) as follows:
| Rating | Explanation | Description |
| A | Good | Performing as intended and operating efficiently |
| B | Satisfactory | Performing as intended but exhibiting minor deterioration |
| C | Poor | Exhibiting major defects and/or not operating as intended |
| D | Bad | Life expired and/or serious risk of imminent failure |
| Priority | Explanation | Description |
| 1 | Urgent works | That will prevent immediate closure of premises and/or address an immediate high risk to the health and safety of occupants and/or remedy a serious breach of legislation |
| 2 | Essential work | Required within 2 years that will prevent serious deterioration of the fabric or services and/or address a medium risk to the health and safety of occupants and/or remedy a less serious breach of legislation |
| 3 | Desirable work | Required within 3-5 years that will prevent deterioration of the fabric or services and/or address a low risk to the health and safety of occupants and/or remedy a minor breach of legislation |
| 4 | Long term work | Required outside the 5 year planning period that will prevent deterioration of the fabric or services |
Your building condition survey report should be supplied in spreadsheet format by your professional building consultants which will then allow you to sort the rating of elements by D1 (in Bad condition, requiring Urgent works) and C2 (in Poor condition, requiring Essential work). Having identified your D1 and C2 works, you can then prioritise these based on your knowledge of your estate and the principles stated in your Asset Management Plan. For example, if both a roof replacement and heating distribution replacement have been identified as D1 elements for the same building, the roof replacement should be prioritised over the heating works.
Planned Preventative Maintenance
As a guide, 70% of a building maintenance budget should be allocated for planned preventative maintenance, and 30% for reactive maintenance. To identify planned preventative maintenance tasks for your buildings and plant, you should refer to your Operations & Maintenance manuals, and manufacturers’ guidance. If you have access to a computer-aided facilities management system, it may state how often statutory tasks, such as water temperature testing, should be carried out. Some tasks are required to be carried out by suitably qualified contractors, the cost of which will be recorded in your financial management system. Such costs should be reviewed annually in order to ensure that value for money is being obtained.
Whilst reactive maintenance costs are harder to forecast, if records are kept on your computer-aided facilities management system of items such as broken windows, it should be possible to download a report for the previous academic year and identify the prevalence of such tasks against which a cost can be estimated if the actual cost has not been recorded. If more than 30% of your maintenance budget is being spent on reactive maintenance, further investigation should be carried out to identify why and what proactive measures can be taken to reduce this spend in future.
Sources of Funding
Appropriate sources of funding should be identified for capital works. These may include Devolved Formula Capital funding which is disseminated to all schools in England. Trusts are also eligible to submit applications for School Condition Funding if they are a stand-alone academy or a Trust with fewer than 3,000 students on role or less than 5 schools. Larger Trusts are allocated School Condition Allocation funding annually. Other sources of funding may include the use of reserves or loans where applicable.
Where to Find Further Information
For further information on budgeting for the school estates, please see the Good Estate Management for Schools document Planning and organising your estate resources which can be found here:
See also our earlier blog in this series:
About The Trust Network
Established in 2014, The Trust Network is an independently run peer network, dedicated to good school estates management. We are managed by our members and for our members and share best practice and knowledge through regular events and webinars. We provide a single voice to discuss issues at a national level with the DofE and other national agencies.
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