Every design project, at some stage, will go through a scoping exercise. In very large projects, the scope may already have been determined before the Process Team engages with the project, in which case this stage is straightforward and consists of merely understanding the key issues as they have been set out.

Increasingly, however, projects that involve any degree of refurbishment may still require some degree of scoping after the project commences.

Scoping aims merely to understand what the project is, what it is not, what budget is available for works, what the key dates are, and what output is required. Without this information, the project may start off working under the assumption it has the ability to change something it does not.

Some examples of scoping with the pilot projects:

Phoenix School, Telford, was within their Building Schools for Future programme. Our scoping was to determine what work had already been done, whether the school was new build or refurbishment, and what was the overall likely capital budget.

West Hill, Wandsworth, was committing devolved formula capital to our project. Our scoping was to determine the scale of intervention we could make at the school, and how the output would be passed over for detailed design and implementation.

In one pilot, we found no budget had been allocated in advance. Instead, our work would go to inform a proposal to the council for funding. This made life harder on the Process Team, since aside from the fact that the amount raised would be in the realms of refurbishment as opposed to new build, it was very complex to know the scale of intervention the team could make. Some pilots had a very fixed sense of what or where the project was going to be (particularly in the case of several small scale pilots). This is a likely scenario when working on schemes where the school is commissioning works to improve certain spaces.

In other projects, we needed to understand what our work was not about. We worked with one school, Freebrough in Redcar, that was becoming an Academy, but with no funding attached to evolve its current school building into a new series of spaces. The sponsors and new Principal were in the process of working through the educational vision with an educationalist. Our work had to synthesize with that work, to support implementation, whilst still providing the innovation we could bring to the table within the Concept Brief stage.

We found this stage could take a series of meetings, or it could be as simple as a phone call. It requires the particular presence of the Project Leader, and ideally both someone from the commissioning body (such as a Local Authority, sponsor), and someone from the Senior Leadership Team, usually the Head, Principal, or Deputy.

It is also useful to set a briefing sentence at this stage, the aim of the project. This is useful because it allows you to focus later in the project. For example, develop an alternative scheme to building an extra classroom to support our 1FE expansion.