‘High bar’ for new estates improvement notices, says official

The bar for trusts and councils issued with new notices to improve school estates will be “very high”, and only if they are failing to engage with the government, an official has said.

The academy trust handbook was updated this year to state that notices to improve may be issued to chains that fail “to manage their school estate and maintain it in a safe working condition strategically and effectively”.

The change prompted concern that trusts could be penalised for issues caused by a lack of capital funding.

The matter was raised several times with Department for Education officials at the Education Estates conference in Manchester this week.

Asked what the “likely threshold” for intervention would be, Lindsay Harris, the department’s deputy director for education estates, said it would be “pretty high”.

He said the update was added to “signal to trusts that estate management is a core part of their responsibility. It’s a legal responsibility. Trusts need to be managing their buildings in the same way they need to be managing their finances.

“I think there would be a very high bar for issuing a notice to improve, and it would only be in cases where a trust was failing to engage with the department.”

DfE struggled to get ‘basic info’ about RAAC

Over the past year, the RAAC crisis forced the government to engage with all responsible bodies – councils and trusts – in England.

“We did come across instances where we found it very difficult to get basic information,” said Harris, although he admitted he was talking about “a tiny minority of responsible bodies”.

The “vast majority” were responsive and “on their game. They know what they’re doing.”

But the ability to issue notices to improve would be “there in the back pocket for those rare cases where we’re simply not getting engagement on estate management, which is not acceptable.”

Pressed further at a later session, Harris said: “Our expectation is that it will be extremely rare cases where we would use this.”

“It’s not quite like financial documents where there are a series of clear things, returns that trusts have made to the department, and it’s much easier to say ‘you haven’t met your responsibilities’.”

He pointed to the government’s “good estates management for schools” guidance, known as GEMS.

But he said it was “not a standard that you can measure people on”.