Esther Campsall
Legal Director
Legal Director in the Governance, funding & corporate team

Esther is a legal director specialising in education governance and charity law. She has over a decade’s experience of advising multi academy trusts and schools on governance matters, including academy conversions, mergers, converting single-academy trusts into multi-academy trusts, updating Articles of Association and amending funding agreements. She runs Academy Company Secretarial workshops specifically for multi academy trusts and advises on internal governance procedures for schools and multi academy trusts.
Esther also advises on general charity law, including restructuring, merging, collaboration, contracts, trust law and property law in both an education and charity context. She liaises with the Charity Commission on all aspects of charity regulation, including registration, altering governing documents, serious incident reporting and trustee payments. She also regularly provides training to trustees on various matters, including trustees’ duties and responsibilities, restructuring and general legal updates.
My advice and articles
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Academy trust handbook – changes effective 2025
In line with its usual approach, the Department for Education published an amended version of the Academy Trust Handbook in the Summer of...
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Volunteering is for volunteers, not workers; any confusion could be costly
The approximate annual cost of replacing volunteers with paid staff across the UK would be £16.4billion; they are a resource many...
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Protecting trustees; is the law moving?
The law places considerable responsibility on charity trustees running charitable organisations with integrity and honesty and yet there...
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Muddying the waters of volunteer status
Volunteers are the lifeblood of many charitable organisations. Those organisations could not exist without them, but neither could they...
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Is this the end for the governing body? Life after the transfer into a MAT
You would be forgiven for thinking that once a school has transferred into a multi-academy trust (MAT), the members of the governing body...
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DfE making lighter reading for schools when it comes to governance – two new governance guides launched
So it’s big news but not big news. Instead of maintained schools and academies having to sift through a joint Governance Handbook which...
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