Masterplan service guide

Bring your school together with a strategic, future-proof masterplan.

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?”

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.

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.

How we work

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Fieldwork

50 students from St Christopher’s attend a full-day studio visit, career day and co-design workshop, hosted by the Kennedy Woods team.

Empathy is the capacity to step into other people's shoes and understand opportunities and challenges from their perspectives.

Human-centred design is premised on empathy, on the idea that the people you're designing for are the best source of inspiration for meaningful problem-solving.

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.

Fieldwork is our name for the time spent on-site, getting to know how life works at your school.

Our underlying methodology has been refined over years of trial and experimentation and is designed to surface invaluable insight.

The design team will sift through learnings gathered during time on-site to produce a clear set of insights and validated strategic goals.

Insights will be clustered around seven key areas of research, to help reveal patterns, priorities, and tensions for the school as a whole.

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Site Audit

Audit your estate to understand its development potential.

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Design

Explore options and shape the best possible future for your school.

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Communication

Bring your vision to life with bold imagery and film.

Who we are

We are education specialists designing kind, clever places that help people learn and grow.

We work across every scale, from estate masterplans to interior fit-outs.

We design with school communities,
not for them.

And we live by our values, taking our commitments and responsibilities seriously.

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.

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 studies

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.