Estate masterplanning for a multi-academy trust: from condition data to a ten-year plan

By Grayling Thomas Architects · November 2026

An estate masterplan for a multi-academy trust is one costed plan covering every school the trust runs. It sets out which buildings to repair, adapt, extend or replace, in what order and from which funding, over roughly a decade. It is built from condition data, pupil place forecasts, suitability assessments, SEND demand and energy performance, and it ranks schools against each other rather than one at a time. The Department for Education already expects a trust to have an estate strategy and asset management plan in place. The masterplan is what makes those documents add up across the whole portfolio, and it gives the board a sequence of decisions it can actually approve.

This guide is written for the chief executive, the chief operating officer and the trustees who will sign the plan off.

What is an estate masterplan, and how is it different from a condition survey?

Boards are often handed three different documents under similar names. A condition survey records the state of each building element and prices the repairs. A single-school masterplan shows how one site could change: where a new block could go, what the site can hold, how phasing keeps the school open. An estate masterplan sits above both. It asks a portfolio question: given everything the trust knows about all of its schools, where should the next capital go, and what should the estate look like in ten years' time?

The DfE's School estate management standards set the floor. At the baseline level, a trust should have an estate strategy and an asset management plan. The estate strategy "outlines how you plan to invest in the estate over the next 3-5 years to meet any longer-term targets". The asset management plan "includes data about the estate, sets out action needed to maintain the estate, actions needed to achieve the estate strategy and aligns to the educational vision". Both are to be reviewed, approved and signed off by the governing body, trustees or landowners.

For what a trust will need to show against these standards each year, see our guide to what the School Estate Management Standards annual return will ask trusts to show.

An estate masterplan takes that three-to-five-year strategy and gives it a physical form and a longer horizon: drawings of each site, a phasing sequence and a cost envelope the board can test against likely funding. The longer view matches the government's own. The education estates strategy describes "a 10 year plan for the education estate", with a shift towards long-term strategic maintenance and renewal.

Turning one school's survey into a costed list of projects is a separate exercise, covered in From school condition assessment to a five-year plan. The estate masterplan takes those lists from every school and sets them side by side.

Gathering the evidence across every school

The plan is only as good as the data under it, and the commonest weakness is data collected to different standards at different schools. Five inputs matter.

• Condition. A current, graded and priced condition survey for every school, done to one specification so the grades compare. The DfE's own condition data has limits here: the CDC2 programme page states that "On its own, CDC2 data is not suitable for local asset management purposes". Among the reasons it gives, the data does not provide "descriptions of defects and remedies or cost information".

• Places. Pupil forecasts for each school set against its capacity. Falling rolls matter as much as rising ones, because empty space still has to be heated, maintained and insured.

• Suitability. Whether the rooms do the job now asked of them. The standards expect a trust to assess "whether the estate and its facilities are fit for purpose and whether the estate has the right amount of space for the number of school places".

• SEND demand. The trust's own pattern of need, and the local authority's plans for specialist places and inclusion bases. The estates strategy talks of "aligning place creation with our ambitions, including on SEND and skills". Where a mainstream school is a candidate for a base, inclusion base design is covered separately.

• Energy and running cost. The core data the standards list includes "energy efficiency data including CO2 emissions and energy cost data". A building that is cheap to repair but expensive to run may still rank high.

Most trusts hold some of this already. The masterplanning work is in making it consistent, and in drawing each site so that options can be tested rather than guessed.

How should a trust rank schools across the estate?

Ranking works best in two passes.

The first pass is a filter, not a score. Anything that threatens a building's safety or its ability to stay open goes to the top, whichever school it is in. Structural concerns, failing fire safety systems and asbestos that cannot be managed in place belong here. These items are not debated against each other; they are funded.

The second pass compares everything else on agreed criteria. The estates strategy sets a national order of thought, describing renewal "that prioritises condition need, risk and resilience". A trust can adopt that and add its own educational priorities.

The last row is where an estate view earns its cost. A roof due for replacement over classrooms that the forecast says will be remodelled should be done once, as one project, not twice. A school with spare space next to a school short of it may solve both problems with less building than two separate schemes.

Agree the criteria and their weighting before anyone sees the ranked list. Once heads see where their school sits, the conversation changes, and a board that settled the rules first is in a far stronger position.

Matching the plan to the money

A ranked list is not yet a plan; it becomes one when each project is matched to a realistic source of funding and a year.

For larger trusts, the main source is School Condition Allocation (SCA), paid to the trust to spend across its schools. The current eligibility rule is that the trust "must have had 5 or more open schools at the start of September 2025" and those schools "must have had at least 3,000 pupils counted in the spring 2025 census". Pupils in special and alternative provision schools count more heavily: the DfE says "we multiply the pupil count by 4.5" for this test. The DfE notifies trusts each autumn and says eligibility "should not be assumed unless it has been confirmed". How the annual allocation should be split is covered in School Condition Allocation (SCA): how academy trusts should prioritise the money; the masterplan is what gives that annual split a direction. Smaller trusts bid into the Condition Improvement Fund (CIF) instead, school by school, and the masterplan then becomes the source of each bid's evidence.

The government has said it wants to give responsible bodies "greater certainty" about future allocations, "to support longer-term strategic asset management plans". That is a direct invitation to plan beyond a single year.

Other routes sit alongside condition funding:

• Renewal and Retrofit Programme. The new programme is backed by £710 million to 2029-30. It will "fund projects at buildings that typically cannot be delivered from existing maintenance funding but that are not at the point of needing to be rebuilt". The strategy said it would start with schools in the East Midlands, Yorkshire and the Humber and the South East from April 2026, and be national by 2029.

• High needs capital. The strategy describes "at least £3.7 billion in high needs capital between 2025-26 and 2029-30 which local authorities can use". SEND projects in the masterplan therefore need an early conversation with each local authority.

• Rebuilding. Rebuilding is decided nationally, through the School Rebuilding Programme. A masterplan should record where a building is close to the end of its life, but it cannot plan on being selected.

Showing each project against its likely source makes gaps visible early. A school whose top priority has no funding route is a board problem now, not in year four.

When a single project from the plan reaches the board, our guide to what governors should check before approving a school building project sets out the evidence trustees should ask for.

Decisions that sit with the board

Most of the masterplan is technical. A small number of decisions are not, and they belong with trustees.

• The vision and the rules. What the estate should look like in ten years, and the criteria used to rank schools. These come before the list.

• Ownership. The standards, at their advanced level, describe "a dedicated board member to oversee the effective management of the estate". Many trusts benefit from naming one well before then.

• Revenue as well as capital. At the same level, the standards ask the trust to "consider the revenue implications of any short-, medium- and long-term investment". A new block brings cleaning, energy and maintenance costs with it.

• Space the trust no longer needs. Surplus space is a decision about community use, leasing or consolidation, and it may need the landowner's agreement.

• The review cycle. The estates strategy asks responsible bodies "to make an annual return from autumn 2026 on how they are meeting the expectations in the School Estate Management Standards". An annual refresh of the masterplan fits that rhythm.

What earlier projects show about phasing and options

Three projects from the practice's portfolio show the kind of thinking an estate plan needs at site level.

Costed options before priorities. For an independent school's co-educational masterplan, the study "explored a range of potential development options, each supported with approximate costs". That allowed the school "to prioritise projects and consider how they might be phased in alignment with the academic calendar". A trust board needs exactly this at every school before it ranks across the estate: options with prices, not single proposals.

Finding land inside an existing site. At Bishop Stopford School, the science, art and humanities block was a new four-storey sixth form block "as part of a wider masterplan for the college campus". It came from an initial feasibility and campus study that "identified opportunities to maximise underused land", and a disused service yard became the site of two new science laboratories. Funding was secured through a CIF bid. On the same campus, the sixth form study centre was built "on the existing car park without disrupting school operations or reducing parking capacity". Site-wide study often finds space that a single project brief would miss.

Growing a school while it stays open. At All Saints Primary School, the brief was "to double the pupil capacity from a 210-place junior school to a 420-place primary school". The new building was designed to occupy as little ground as possible so the existing school could keep running alongside it, and construction "was split into three phases to enable the existing school to function without the hindrance of construction work". Where the place forecast points to growth, the phasing plan is as important as the building.

Related guides

• Condition due diligence when a school joins your trust

• Short of space or short of the right rooms? A BB103 check for schools

• School condition surveyors: what the role covers in a CIF bid and how to choose one

Estate masterplanning at Grayling Thomas Architects

Grayling Thomas Architects is a RIBA Chartered Practice in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire, practising since 2010. We prepare school and estate masterplans for trusts and schools, and the condition surveys and other education surveys that give them a consistent evidence base. Our team also designs and delivers the projects that follow, and writes CIF bids where a school is eligible.

If your trust is preparing an estate strategy, or needs its existing plan to hold together across several schools, contact us to talk it through.