Masterplan Deep Dive
10-minute read
Schools are living ecosystems.
Each year brings a new mix of students, staff, and families, reshaping the character of the community. No two years are alike.
Amid this continuous change, architecture offers a rare permanence. It frames every lesson, gathering, and transition, quietly shaping the rhythm of daily life.
A masterplan is a school’s chance to pause, to step back from short-term fixes and ask a simple but demanding question: Where do we want to be in ten years?
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50 students from St Christopher’s attend a full-day studio visit, career day and co-design workshop, hosted by the Kennedy Woods team.
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50 students from St Christopher’s attend a full-day studio visit, career day and co-design workshop, hosted by the Kennedy Woods team.
BIG AND BOLD
A masterplan can be visionary.
It creates space for schools to stop patching over problems and instead chart a long-term course.
Ideal for:
10-year planning
Identifying legacy projects
Site reconfiguration
Transition to co-ed or mergers
SMALL AND SMART
A masterplan can also be precise and incremental.
Focused interventions, delivered within complex sites, that gradually add up to meaningful change.
Ideal for:
Constrained sites
Limited budget
Post-VAT challenges
Building financial resilience
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50 students from St Christopher’s attend a full-day studio visit, career day and co-design workshop, hosted by the Kennedy Woods team.
1 /8
Fieldwork
Design starts with listening.
Fieldwork is the time we spend on site, observing how life actually unfolds at your school.
It’s empathy in practice: stepping into others’ shoes to see opportunities and challenges from their perspective.
Fieldwork involves
Staff interviews
Parent interviews
Focus groups
Pupil engagement activities
Shadowing
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50 students from St Christopher’s attend a full-day studio visit, career day and co-design workshop, hosted by the Kennedy Woods team.
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50 students from St Christopher’s attend a full-day studio visit, career day and co-design workshop, hosted by the Kennedy Woods team.
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50 students from St Christopher’s School in Hampstead attend a full-day studio visit, career day and co-design workshop, hosted by the Kennedy Woods team.
Children see schools differently.
They know the shortcuts, the bottlenecks, the surprising places they’ve claimed as their own, and the spaces that feel forgotten.
When invited in, they share this perspective freely, realising their voice matters.
In return, we offer career days, studio visits and other educational workshops to give them a glimpse into the world of design.
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50 students from St Christopher’s attend a full-day studio visit, career day and co-design workshop, hosted by the Kennedy Woods team.
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50 students from St Christopher’s attend a full-day studio visit, career day and co-design workshop, hosted by the Kennedy Woods team.
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The Crunch
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50 students from St Christopher’s attend a full-day studio visit, career day and co-design workshop, hosted by the Kennedy Woods team.
After listening comes sifting.
We sort observations into patterns, priorities, and tensions, turning individual comments into clear, refined insights.
These become the foundation of the masterplan.
- Staff interviews
- Pupil engagement activities
- Shadowing
- Insight report
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50 students from St Christopher’s attend a full-day studio visit, career day and co-design workshop, hosted by the Kennedy Woods team.
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50 students from St Christopher’s attend a full-day studio visit, career day and co-design workshop, hosted by the Kennedy Woods team.
2 /4
Site Analysis
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50 students from St Christopher’s attend a full-day studio visit, career day and co-design workshop, hosted by the Kennedy Woods team.
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50 students from St Christopher’s attend a full-day studio visit, career day and co-design workshop, hosted by the Kennedy Woods team.
Zooming out gives clarity.
Site analysis reveals the bigger picture - layouts, flows, and blind spots invisible from ground level.
It’s where opportunities otherwise hidden at eye level can emerge.
Site Analysis involves:
Layout reviews
SWOT analysis
Occupancy evaluation
Site surveys
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50 students from St Christopher’s attend a full-day studio visit, career day and co-design workshop, hosted by the Kennedy Woods team.
3 /4
Design
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50 students from St Christopher’s attend a full-day studio visit, career day and co-design workshop, hosted by the Kennedy Woods team.
Design is the exploration of options.
We start wide—asking “What if? What if? What if?”—and generate possibilities without constraint.
Then we cut back in. We evaluate and stress-test ideas with rigorous data modelling.
Design involves:
Capacity studies
Reorganisation studies
Scenario modelling
Refurbishment proposals
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50 students from St Christopher’s attend a full-day studio visit, career day and co-design workshop, hosted by the Kennedy Woods team.
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50 students from St Christopher’s attend a full-day studio visit, career day and co-design workshop, hosted by the Kennedy Woods team.
4 /4
Storytelling
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50 students from St Christopher’s attend a full-day studio visit, career day and co-design workshop, hosted by the Kennedy Woods team.
Marshall Ganz wrote: “Hope is the belief in the probability of the possible rather than the necessity of the probable.”
A masterplan only succeeds if it is communicated with clarity and conviction—through storytelling, imagery, and film.
Done right, it can inspire a school community not just to see the future, but to believe in it together.
Storytelling involves:
Cost planning
Phasing and programming
Fundraising efforts
Future planning applications
Community engagement
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50 students from St Christopher’s attend a full-day studio visit, career day and co-design workshop, hosted by the Kennedy Woods team.
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50 students from St Christopher’s attend a full-day studio visit, career day and co-design workshop, hosted by the Kennedy Woods team.
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50 students from St Christopher’s attend a full-day studio visit, career day and co-design workshop, hosted by the Kennedy Woods team.
▲
50 students from St Christopher’s attend a full-day studio visit, career day and co-design workshop, hosted by the Kennedy Woods team.
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50 students from St Christopher’s attend a full-day studio visit, career day and co-design workshop, hosted by the Kennedy Woods team.
A masterplan sets the direction, but the real test comes next: turning vision into reality.
We work with schools not only to plan but to build - helping translate strategy into bricks and mortar.
Project delivery involves
Architectural Services
Interior Design
Planning Permission
Contract Administration
We are education specialists designing kind, clever places that help people learn and grow.
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50 students from St Christopher’s attend a full-day studio visit, career day and co-design workshop, hosted by the Kennedy Woods team.
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50 students from St Christopher’s attend a full-day studio visit, career day and co-design workshop, hosted by the Kennedy Woods team.
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50 students from St Christopher’s attend a full-day studio visit, career day and co-design workshop, hosted by the Kennedy Woods team.
We work across every scale, from estate masterplans to interior fit-outs.
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50 students from St Christopher’s attend a full-day studio visit, career day and co-design workshop, hosted by the Kennedy Woods team.
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50 students from St Christopher’s attend a full-day studio visit, career day and co-design workshop, hosted by the Kennedy Woods team.
We design with school communities,
not for them.
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50 students from St Christopher’s attend a full-day studio visit, career day and co-design workshop, hosted by the Kennedy Woods team.
And we live by our values, taking our commitments and responsibilities seriously.
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50 students from St Christopher’s attend a full-day studio visit, career day and co-design workshop, hosted by the Kennedy Woods team.
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50 students from St Christopher’s attend a full-day studio visit, career day and co-design workshop, hosted by the Kennedy Woods team.
Our vision is a world where the design of every school sparks courage, compassion and curiosity.
If this gets you fired up, we invite you to book your free introductory workshop with Tom and the design team.
BIG AND BOLD
A masterplan can be a big-picture vision, where a school pauses the pattern of short-term hacks and patches to ask, “Where do we want to be in 10 years?” …
Ideal for:
10-year planning
Identifying legacy projects
Site reconfiguration
Transition to co-ed or mergers
SMALL AND SMART
A masterplan can be tactical and forensic, focused on finding cost-effective interventions and improvements that add up to change over time.
Ideal for:
Constrained sites
Limited budgets
Post-VAT challenges
Building financial resilience
Of the 5 or 6 architectural firms that we have worked with in the last 5 years, Kennedy Woods are amongst the very best and I have no hesitation in recommending them to other educational providers.
Mark Dingle
Operations Director
Wishford Education
We found Chris, Tom and the team to be full of ideas, keep well to the brief, respond to critique constructively and importantly to fit well with our way of thinking and doing things.
Vicky Garner
Director
Living Villages Cook School
I highly recommend their services to any school seeking innovative and thoughtful architectural solutions.
Paul Neagle
Bursar
St Christopher’s Hampstead
For a group of franchise CEO’s who rarely have the opportunity to come together, we were a hard group to please. Tom and the team exceeded all expectations.
Emily Vermont
Director
School of Social Entrepreneurs
I would recommend them to other clients looking for a practice who can apply fresh thinking and dedication to a project.
Neil Kirby
Head of Regeneration
Southwark Council
Finding architects who understand school needs are rare and I despaired - until I met Tom and Chris. From the beginning, they listened to us and guided us as we created our forward-thinking masterplan and rolled out its first phase.
Sandrine Pailasse
Headteacher
St Christopher’s Hampstead
Chris and the team are commercially minded and easy to work with - their focus on delivery, fast turnaround times, and willingness to adapt made them a great architecture and design partner for our first 30 sites.
Pete Spencer
Project Manager
N Family Club
Case study 1 /5
St Christopher’s School, Hampstead
Supporting new leadership with a 10-year strategic, engagement-led masterplan, marking the school’s 150th anniversary.
Case study 2 /5
Westminster Under School
Extensive 3,250 m² office retrofit and refurbishment of the original Victorian building, supporting Westminster’s transition to co-education.
Case study 3 /5
St David’s School, Bromley
Delivering a strategic masterplan to increase capacity, securing planning on a highly sensitive, TPO-protected site.
Case study 4 /5
Glendower Preparatory School, Kensington
Engagement-led masterplan to unlock additional space on a highly constrained central London site.
Case study 5 /5
Moor House School & College, Oxted
Engagement-led masterplan for a SEND school specialising in language disorders and DLD, increasing capacity to 260 students.
Fees
CALCULATING YOUR BENCHMARK FEE
The foundation of a great school masterplan is a clear strategic brief and shared understanding of what’s involved. It requires setting a budget - and all too often, this can stall a project before it even gets going.
For architects, it's hard to provide an accurate price without a detailed scope of services being agreed. And for schools, it's hard to define a scope without understanding the costs involved.
To overcome this common issue, we offer three pricing bands to establish an initial fee benchmark.
The band we place you in depends on the scale of your estate and complexity of your project, which translates to how much time developing a well-considered, engagement-led masterplan will require.
NEED HELP SETTING A FEE?
Book your free workshop to discuss your project complexity and receive a benchmark fee in 24 hours.