When thinking about our estates, I believe that we should be aiming for excellence. The state of the buildings and facilities we have available for our staff and pupils is just as important as the excellence we strive for in teaching and learning.  Both directly impact how students feel, what they believe they can achieve, and the outcomes we see. 

Over the last few months, most school estate leaders lived through the annual, breathless marathon that is the summer holidays work window.  Whether your school or trust has just completed a major capital build, a modern refurbishment, or a series of critical CIF-funded compliance upgrades, September brings relief; the scaffolding is down and the doors are open. 

But once the dust settles, a critical question remains:  

Did we actually achieve what we set out to do? 

Simply put, it is a structured review of a completed project after it has been occupied for a set period; usually three to six months, and again at the one-year mark. 

The amount of funding that is available to schools to look after and improve our facilities is limited, and maximizing every single pound is a constant challenge. When we secure SCA funding or win a hard-fought CIF bid, we owe it to our schools to evaluate the outcomes rigorously. A robust evaluation framework looks past the basic metrics of time and budget. It digs into the functional, environmental, and educational reality of the space.  

It asks: Is the ventilation working as designed? Are teachers using the layout the way we envisioned? Is the multi-purpose space we creatively designed actually serving its dual purpose? 

Three Step Cycle 

Building this framework shouldn’t feel daunting. Like any strong estate strategy, it relies on clear structure, realistic objectives, and consistent communication. To make it a seamless part of your operations, build it around a simple three-step cycle: 

1. The Technical Review: Work with your team to review energy consumption, smart building data, and maintenance logs. Did the new LED lighting or heating deliver the efficiency drops promised? 
2. The User Experience Review: Gather feedback from the people who live in the spaces. Create simple surveys or hold quick focus groups with teachers, support staff, and pupils. 
3. The Financial Wash-up: Sit down with finance teams and contractors to analyse budget variations. What can we learn about our tendering process for next time? 

To ensure this framework becomes a living document rather than something put in place and never referred to, it needs a detailed action plan. Assign clear roles, responsibilities, and timescales to the review process right at the start of a project, so the evaluation is seen as a natural final phase, not an afterthought. 

When deciding what to measure, focus on pillars that align estates development directly with your school/trust goals: 

• Educational Impact: Did the refurbishment improve the environment? Look at acoustic comfort, temperature, and light. 

• Operational Reality: Is the new estate easy to manage? If a beautiful design requires specialist, expensive maintenance, it’s a long-term drain on your limited budget. 

• Financial Return: Compare your up-to-date Condition Survey and energy bills against your project baseline. Are we seeing the reduction in reactive costs that justified the capital spend? 

• Wellbeing: Excellent estates create environments where staff feel valued and pupils feel safe. Measure whether the project has positively affected morale or reduced behavioural incidents. 

The estates team in a school can often appear invisible, but their contribution to everyday life is crucial, and it must be recognized. A post-growth evaluation is a fantastic vehicle for highlighting that contribution. 

When conducting these reviews, spend time with your estate team, caretakers and cleaning teams. Ask them for their experience and knowledge. They are the ones who notice the small design flaws that a surveyor might miss; the door that swings the wrong way for heavy traffic, or the window restrictor that makes a room stifling. Involving the whole team can make the difference between a fantastic achievement and a missed opportunity. It empowers staff, showing that their operational insights directly shape future design standards. 

Good estate management is an exciting challenge, and compliance is a necessity. But working collaboratively with SLT, estate, and finance teams to bring plans to fruition; and proving their success through a clear evaluation, is a deeply satisfying achievement. 

As we look ahead at this academic year, let’s use the lessons of this summer’s builds to sharpen our approach. By building a robust Post-Growth Evaluation Framework today, we ensure that every future bid we write, every contractor we invite to tender, and every pound we spend is informed by hard evidence. That is how we move away from reactive fixes and continuously raise the bar for our school estates. 

When deciding what to measure, focus on pillars that align estates development directly with your school/trust goals: 

• Educational Impact: Did the refurbishment improve the environment? Look at acoustic comfort, temperature, and light. 

• Operational Reality: Is the new estate easy to manage? If a beautiful design requires specialist, expensive maintenance, it’s a long-term drain on your limited budget. 

• Financial Return: Compare your up-to-date Condition Survey and energy bills against your project baseline. Are we seeing the reduction in reactive costs that justified the capital spend? 

• Wellbeing: Excellent estates create environments where staff feel valued and pupils feel safe. Measure whether the project has positively affected morale or reduced behavioural incidents.