Northamptonshire County Council received significant assistance from the CFG team over the past 18 months, planning and scheduling 14 schools, Primary and Secondary through PFI and Capital Build programs.

We believe it is important to involve the end users as much as possible in the decision making process to ensure they get solutions that are fit for purpose. This presented quite a challenge with a building project of this size and short timescale. Therefore it was important to manage the furniture selection strategically.

To meet such a tight programme, it would have been easy just to use generic shopping lists of furniture for each classroom without giving the schools any input into the process. Sadly, this is a common selection method which will result in furniture selection that is at best, adequate. Often top-up orders are required afterwards to fill the gaps. Involving the teachers in the process, helps ensure that the furniture provision is far better for the their needs.

Drawing from our spatial planning experience, we worked our way through all of the schools designing the room layouts. These were

packaged with Furniture & Equipment schedules, images of the selected products and a series of classroom schemes with coordinated colour options (below), ready for presentation to the schools.

We developed an effective working partnership with the Project Coordinators at Northamptonshire County Council, who visited the schools and worked through our designs with the teachers. They then fed this information back to us to make the necessary amendments.

Most of our work was done remotely, over the phone or via email. We provided their project team with the advice, designs and information

they needed to step through the process smoothly and efficiently. And of course, as CFG members, Northamptonshire County Council received all our help and support entirely free of charge as part of our Furniture Service.