Pattern Book

What is the School Infrastructure Pattern Book?

The School Infrastructure Pattern Book provides EFSG compliant design and building components which streamline the design, approval, procurement and delivery of educational facilities.

The Pattern Book will provide

• DoE compliant, conceptual designs

• A wide range of design information: whole schools, whole buildings, internal hub layouts, room data and room layout sheets

• project teams with resources to rapidly access pre-approved standardised, adaptable design elements, to develop school designs.

Flexibility within standardisation

School designs are required to be site responsive and through a “mix and match” of Pattern Book elements such as facade compositions, material and colour selections, consultants can create buildings which are appropriate to their context.

At present, the Pattern Book designs focus on 3 storey new schools which are the most prevalent typology. Other school building typologies including halls, COLAs, pre-schools, single and double storey buildings will be progressively added to the 2025 Pattern Book.

How to use the Pattern Book

The Pattern Book consists of four separate volumes

Volume 1: Schedules of Accommodation and School Building Layouts
Volume 2: Building Components
Volume 3: Room Layouts and Room Data Sheets
Volume 4: Digital resources

The Pattern Book will be reviewed on an annual basis however the “baseline” design which consists of fixed elements such as roof pitch and orientation, facade glazing and ventilation, stairs, cores, elimination of glazed louvres etc are not envisaged to change.

Whilst best practice and continual improvement will be applied to the annual review of the details, the baseline design has been developed in consultation with key stakeholders, particularly Asset Management, and there are specific reasons why there are “non-negotiable” design elements.

The Pattern Book should be read in conjunction with the EFSG and Technical Standards. Volume 4 provides links to design information including Revit building models which can be downloaded.

The Pattern Book is essentially “the box” which is situated above ground. The “box” is agnostic of structure and requires adaptation to meet specific project Schedules of Accommodation and site requirements. Project teams are to use the Pattern Book designs whilst remaining responsible for adapting and recording any necessary departures from the DoE's requirements.