Navigating the Academy Trust Handbook 2025: What it means for Estates Managers
In September 2025, the Department of Education’s (DfE) latest Academy Trust Handbook (ATH) introduced new expectations around sustainability, energy management and carbon reduction for trusts across England. Valerie Miller, Chief Customer Officer for DMA Group, outlines the ATH’s recommendations and explains how academies can meet these requirements while also saving money and improving operations.
The 2025 edition of the ATH puts environmental responsibility front and centre. Once a ‘nice-to-have’, sustainability is now a statutory requirement for trusts to meet; it must be measured, reported and meticulously planned, with non-compliance resulting in reputational and financial damage.
Campus estates teams are at the forefront of ensuring their trusts meet these new expectations. Together with their trust leaders, they must understand the new requirements before implementing strategies that guarantee compliance. In this article, I hope to offer some guidance on how this might be achieved, based on DMA Group’s experience working with Leigh Academy Trust – one of the largest in the UK.
But first, what’s actually changed?
Three key aspects of 2025’s ATH should stand out for trusts and their estates teams.
Sustainability is now a formalised mandate for trusts to act upon. While academies were previously encouraged to think about energy efficiency, carbon reduction and climate planning, the newest ATH puts much clearer guidance in place. It explicitly links to the DfE’s own Sustainability and Climate Change Strategy, while instructing each trust to immediately nominate a sustainability lead and devise a climate action plan. Put simply, environmental performance has shifted from optional to obligatory.
The ATH also hands accountability for environmental success over to estates teams. An academy’s estate is now defined as “an asset… to deliver outcomes”, directly linking an estate manager’s duties with the performance of sustainability, safety and efficiency measures. Therefore, both the DfE and trust leaders will be expecting estates teams to take initiative with carbon reductions and energy efficiency.
Finally, the ATH 2025 has shifted the meaning of ‘environmental performance’. Once understood in vague terms, the DfE has quantified its expectations in this area. Trusts are now required to measure and report environmental impact in data-driven ways, with new levels of transparency. Sustainability measures are also no longer distinguishable from a trust’s business arm – the DfE expects them to feed into financial and operational decision making. Energy efficiency and carbon reduction are now indicators of resilient and value-for-money governance.
Integrated data collection and reporting tools will be vital allies for estates teams going forward, to improve operations and demonstrate, in quantifiable terms, how sustainability measures are driving compliance and overall trust performance.
Starting small: audits and quick wins
Understanding current environmental performance is an essential first step when approaching these new regulations. Energy audits should be conducted on heating, cooling, lighting, waste and water systems and general building conditions should also be assessed. Doing this will provide an in-depth understanding of current performance levels, setting a benchmark from which to improve.
Equipped with these baseline statistics, cost-effective quick wins can be achieved that each lead to instant energy savings:
- Replace outdated fluorescent or halogen fittings with more cost-effective LEDs and install motion or daylight sensors in classrooms and toilets. According to the Building Services Research and Information Association (BSRIA), a good lighting control system can result in energy savings of 30-40 per cent.
- Make sure your HVAC system’s optimisers are switched on and aligned with occupant schedules. Even heating a building two hours before occupation typically pumps out 15-20 hours of unnecessary heating per week.
- Check for any faulty sensors or valves that may be relaying incorrect data to your building management system (BMS). This often occurs through a lack of maintenance and can increase energy consumption by up to 50 per cent. Sensors calibrated to within 0.5ºC can cut energy use by 10-15 per cent, compared with those only those calibrated to 2ºC.
Estates teams should use their baseline performance insights to build sustainability action plans with short-, medium- and long-term goals. Immediate savings will help fund more expensive investments. Well-planned initiatives should support wider financial and operational targets, directly contributing towards overall trust performance.
Levelling up: using integrated technology to your advantage
Beyond these initial steps, the trusts that will thrive under the new regulations will be those that leverage integrated and data-driven monitoring and performance management platforms.
When choosing a service management system, data centralisation should be a top priority. By amalgamating analytical insights – from HVAC assets to maintenance engineers – into one comprehensive system, trust leaders equip themselves with transparent oversight of estates. Compliance with the new Handbook’s emphasis on quantifiability and value-for-money results will instantly become easier.
Centralisation is a particular game changer for multi-academy trusts (MATs). The data taken from each academy can be viewed collectively, leading to standardised maintenance and sustainability practices. This will prepare MATs to show the DfE how their environmental measures are integrated across every single site.
Asset tracking with live monitoring and alerts support a predictive approach to maintenance, where works are pre-emptive and based on real need, rather than routine schedules or a reaction once something’s gone wrong. Data-driven systems that continually analyse performance in real time identify small issues before they become major problems. By shifting maintenance from preventative to predictive, trusts can ensure energy-using equipment works at its optimum, while meeting the ATH 2025’s elevated expectations for solid oversight and responsible resource management.
Future-proofing environmental responsibility
The ATH 2025 marks a turning point for academy trusts and their environmental responsibility. While sustainability was once optional, it is now a statutory requirement tied to a trust’s governance, finance and operations.
The pressure of turning these new expectations into results will be firmly placed on the shoulders of campus estates managers. Those who proactively refine their existing systems while embracing overarching management platforms will position their trusts to succeed.
Taking these steps, however, will not only ensure compliance for the year ahead. Given that sustainability measures are likely to become increasingly important in ATHs for years to come, setting a high bar now will only future-proof a trust’s estates management efforts.
So, instead of approaching the ATH 2025 with apprehension, it should be seen it as an opportunity – the catalyst that campus estates teams need to ensure their schools thrive, creating low carbon, cost-effective facilities that support student and staff wellbeing, while promoting the benefits of sustainability to the next generation.
Since 2023, DMA Group has worked with one of the UK’s largest MATs, Leigh Academies Trust (LAT). Supporting over 20,000 students across 32 sites, the trust needed a way to standardise its service quality. Through our proprietary data-driven platform, BiO®, we have centralised and digitalised its estates management operations. Now, over 6,400 of LATs assets are tracked in real time, with live dashboards providing managers with transparent and digestible data.