The $100,000 Question: When Does Engineering on a School Project Start?  

At Regents Park Christian College, being involved before the brief was finalised meant that Birzulis was able to make real savings to the build. By being brought in early, the structural design could be questioned from the ground up. Not from adjustments made during construction, but from rethinking the assumptions while there was still room to change them. 

The original specification called for a 300mm post-tensioned slab. We redesigned it as a 160mm conventional slab using an increased number of bored piers – a change that also allowed us to reduce the size and length of those piers. The steel roof structure was rationalised separately, using smaller and lighter elements to bring down overall framing costs. Combined saving: $100,000+. That didn’t come from value engineering once the build was underway. It came from interrogating the original assumptions while there was still room to change them. 

That’s the nature of efficient engineering on a school project – asking the right questions before the design is fixed. What does the site actually require? Where is the original specification carrying more than it needs to? Where can a simpler, more buildable solution deliver the same or better outcome?

Getting the engineering scope right on a school project means building the staging plan around how the school runs – not adjusting it once the programme is already moving. Site conditions (I.e. access constraints, live services, construction windows) need to be inside the design before anything is locked. And it requires an honest read of the client-side decision-making chain, because a brief that keeps moving affects outcomes regardless of how well the engineering is structured. The most efficient result on a school project is one where the right calls were made early enough that budget and programme were never seriously under pressure. 

Problems on constrained projects are cheapest to resolve before anyone is on site. Getting the engineering right on a school project starts while the scope can still be shaped – and that’s a conversation worth having before the scope is set.