Contract award
Sheppard Robson wins Stockport town centre school design team appointment
By Staff Writer | 20 August 2026
Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council has appointed Sheppard Robson Limited to lead the multi-disciplinary design team for a new through school in the centre of Stockport, under a contract valued at 1,782,766.40 pounds excluding value added tax. The award is dated 19 August 2026 and the notice was published on the official tender service at 8:44am on 20 August 2026.
The value including tax is recorded as 2,139,319.68 pounds. The contract period runs from 21 September 2026 to 20 September 2030, a term of four years. The award is recorded as pending, the standstill period ends at 11:59pm on 1 September 2026, and the notice gives 7 September 2026 as the date on which the contract is expected to be signed. Assessment summaries were sent on 20 August 2026.
Four tenders were received and all four reached the final stage. None came from a small or medium sized enterprise and none came from a voluntary, community or social enterprise. The procedure is recorded as a competitive flexible procedure, run under the Procurement Act 2023, and the classification applied is architectural, construction, engineering and inspection services.
The notice describes the requirement as an architecturally led multidisciplinary design and advisory team, initially including an architect, mechanical, electrical and public health engineers, a structural and civil engineer, a building regulations principal designer and a construction design and management principal designer, appointed to support the delivery of a new through school within the centre of Stockport. The disciplines listed for the consultant team are architect, mechanical and electrical, structural engineer, project manager and planning consultant.
The council states that it is looking to deliver an all through school, building on the existing town centre regeneration, and that the design of the new development should make a positive contribution to the town centre and to its historic townscape. Sheppard Robson Limited is recorded at an address in London and is recorded as a large enterprise. The contracting authority is recorded at Stopford House, Piccadilly, Stockport, with procurement handled through a shared procurement service.
What the practitioner should take from this
The first point is the procedure. A competitive flexible procedure is the route created by the Procurement Act 2023 for requirements a buyer wants to shape as it goes, and it is the successor to the old competitive procedure with negotiation and competitive dialogue. It gives the authority latitude to design the stages, and that latitude cuts both ways: the rules the authority set for itself in its tender notice and associated documents are the rules against which its conduct is measured. On a design team appointment run this way, the assessment summaries issued to each bidder are the primary record of how the criteria were applied.
The second point is the tender statistics. Four bids, four at final stage, none from a small or medium sized enterprise. On an appointment of this size that is a narrow field, and it tells a consultant considering similar work that the qualification requirements were set at a level only larger practices met. Where an authority publishes those figures, they are useful evidence of where the effective threshold sat, which is more informative than the value alone.
The third point is the composition of the team. The requirement names both a building regulations principal designer and a construction design and management principal designer as separate roles within the same appointment. Those are two distinct statutory duty holder functions and they are not interchangeable, even where one organisation performs both. A school is a building to which the building regulations duty holder requirements apply in full, so the appointment documents need to be clear which entity within the team carries each function, from which date, and what happens if the design team changes during the four year term.
The fourth point is the term. Four years for a design appointment on a scheme that has not yet reached planning is a long runway, and it implies that the client expects the team to carry the project from concept through construction. The corresponding question is what stages are actually instructed and paid for at the outset, and on what basis later stages are triggered. An appointment of this length that is silent on stage gateways tends to produce an argument about scope creep at the point where the design freezes.
The fifth point is that the award is pending. The contract is not signed and the standstill period does not close until 1 September. Any planning of resource against this appointment should treat the September signature date as the earliest, not the certain, start.
No construction value, floor area, pupil number, programme or planning application date is published in the notice, and none is stated here.