Barkers EPM
Trusts are measured against the DfE School Estate Management Standards, and most have no estates professional. We designed and built a platform that shows them where they stand and what to do next.
- Sector
- Education & public sector estates
- Services
- UX · AI Enablement · Development · Managed Service
- Buyer
- Multi-academy trusts, school business leaders
- Status
- Live · ongoing support
What they do
Barker Associates is a UK education property consultancy covering school, academy, independent and higher education estates — condition surveys, statutory compliance, asset management planning, energy and sustainability strategy, funding applications and project delivery.
They are affiliated partners of the Confederation of School Trusts, ASCL, ISBL and The Trust Network, and work with some of the largest multi-academy trusts in the UK.
What it was costing them
The DfE's School Estate Management Standards benchmark schools as Baseline, Transitioning or Fully Effective, and improvement notices are possible under the Academy Trust Handbook.
Trusts have to meet that on stretched budgets, with little resource and very varied in-house expertise. Many have no estates professional at all.
So the buyer has a legal obligation, no capacity, and a regulator that can now measure them against it.
The work
We built the platform around the standards themselves, so evidence accumulates in the shape a trust will be assessed on rather than in a generic asset register.
Condition and compliance information arrives as surveys, PDFs, spreadsheets and consultants' reports. Turning that into a position a trust can act on was most of the work.
We designed it for a school business leader with no estates background, because that is who usually opens it.
From inspection framework to a plan
A compliance product has published success criteria, and the easy mistake is building a checklist that tells people what they already know they are failing.
So the platform always answers the next question: where you sit against the standard, the smallest set of actions that moves you up a level, and the evidence each action generates.
That gives a trust a plan it can budget against rather than a score it has to explain.
What changed
- 3-level
- DfE standard mapped end to end
- Live
- In use across multi-academy trusts
Trust and estate volumes are being confirmed for publication.
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Could this work for your business?
Thirty minutes with the people who would do the work. You will leave with a view on whether it is worth building and roughly what it costs.