How to Create a Brief for Your School Playground Project

Preparing a brief for a school playground

Creating a playground brief is a simple and quick step that helps you have a smooth and effective playground selection process. A playground brief provides playground companies with an overview of what is required in your playground upgrade project. Often taking the time to complete a brief clarifies your thoughts, but most importantly it ensures that everyone involved is working towards the same goal.

Why create a playground brief?

Having a brief can help you to clarify your playground wants and needs into a succinct format that is simple and easy to communicate. This means you can more easily and clearly clarify your wants to a playground company in order to achieve the best results. This clarity will also help when comparing quotes from playground companies by ensuring you get an ‘apples for apples’ comparison.

Main areas of focus in a playground brief:

• Your school details – Mostly for the benefit of the playground companies to help identify the project and who to contact for further information.
• Project details – A general description of what the project objective is and any outside factors that relate to it.
• Current site & peripheral items – Outline of the space the playground is intended to be built with additional notes regarding any potential areas of concern/note ie access to the area, overhead hazards or existing structures. 
• Wish list – A summary of the items or elements that you want to include in the playground. Be that anything from individual equipment to general colour schemes.

Sample playground brief

There is no right or wrong way to create a brief for your new playground, but we’ve provided a sample brief that summarises a lot of the questions a playground company will often ask. 

While this brief doesn’t have to be completed in its entirety, it’s work thinking through the questions in your head before approaching a playground company. Although, we get many school principals contacting us with no idea what they’re wanting – we help them through the process too!

Next steps

You’ve collated your ideas and done your research. Next you’ve completed a playground brief. 

Send it to a playground consultant at adventure+. Or call to discuss it on 1300 237 587.

Typically, we like to visit your playground site. This gives us a feel for your area and allows us to take accurate measurements of the site and also check the access to the playground. We can also discuss other details of the playground design. 

Following this, we will create a playground design tailored to your area, budget and the other details in your brief. A lot of time and effort goes into every playground design, we like to make sure that it ticks every box, good design principles are followed and that you get the best outcome.