School Cleaning Checklist – A Deep Cleaning Guide

Using A School Cleaning Checklist For Deep Cleaning – Where Do You Start? 

Cleaning a school, whether primary or secondary or sixth form, is a huge responsibility and a labour-intensive task. It’s also an essential one, because the cleaner and more hygienic your premises, the safer they are for pupils and staff.

Now more than ever, it’s vital that all educational institutions present everyone with a safe environment.

How Did Covid-19 Affect School Cleaning Practices?

As we all remember from our own school days, viruses such as common colds begin to circulate during wintertime, and diligent cleaning helps to minimise that circulation. In 2020, of course, the stakes were much higher than usual. The Covid-19 strain of Coronavirus is a global pandemic, and has proved to be much more serious than a run-of-the-mill winter cough or bout of flu.

Of course, there were social distancing measures, staggered schedules and other new safety precautions in place across Britain’s schools, which helped to minimise rises in new cases, but the risk was still very much there. We know that any virus, whether Covid or otherwise, is transmitted among children and between children to adults; and, as we know, the Covid virus specifically can survive on surfaces for several hours or days, depending on the hardness of the surface.

Thorough school cleaning is therefore now more important than ever, and this checklist is designed to guide you through the entire process.

We cover all of the key environments that you might find within a school, highlighting the most important considerations for each one. And why, in a post-Covid era, it’s now more important than ever that deep cleaning processes are upheld to the same, if not higher standards than when the pandemic first began. 

A Methodical Approach to School Cleanliness

Before you begin reading the full checklist, bear this in mind.

A methodical approach is key to cleaning any school of any size. It ensures that every inch is accounted for, and enables you to focus on the most important areas (i.e. those that see the most human traffic and the most amount of contact). It also helps you to maximise efficiency and set a precedent for the coming months (maybe even years) when preventing the spread of Covid-19 will remain a huge priority across the education sector.

You will see below that we advise carrying out most cleaning tasks on a daily basis; however, we do understand that your school might not have sufficient resources to make this happen. At the very least, you need to make sure that surfaces which will be handled regularly receive daily sanitisation – such as door handles, tabletops, chairs, shared equipment and so on.

Entrances and Reception Areas

All visitors to your school, from parents to delivery drivers to Ofsted inspectors, will likely have to pass through an indoor reception area. Given Covid-19, it is key that these areas remain well-stocked with hand sanitiser (outside if possible) and it would also advisable to provide disposable face masks for people to use if they can.

The most important entrance surfaces to clean daily are those that people will touch with their hands or be likely to breathe onto.

Daily focus areas:

• Doors – wiped down
• Door handles – sanitised
• Windows and glass partitions – wiped down
• Sills and ledges – wiped down
• Hard floors – vacuumed and mopped
• Carpets – vacuumed and spot cleaned if needed
• Rubber welcome mats – mopped
• Skirting boards – wiped down
• Chairs and tables – sanitised
• Stationery – sanitised (e.g. signing-in pens and clipboards)
• Bins – emptied and bleached
• Light switches – sanitised
• Corridors

It’s very likely that your hallways will receive the biggest footfalls of any parts of your school, even with Covid precautions such as staggering in place. As such, they will not only be the most visibility dirty (as in non-pandemic times) but will also house germs due to the large amounts of human traffic passing through.

Again, it is strongly advisable to set up hand sanitiser stations all along your corridors – outside each classroom if possible, but at least at one at each end and one at the halfway point.

Sweeping, vacuuming and mopping the corridor floors should remain a daily cleaning task. Wiping down hallway surfaces would ordinarily be weekly tasks for the most part, but should be sanitised daily for the foreseeable future.

Daily focus areas:

• Corridor walls – sanitised
• Exteriors of classroom doors and door handles – sanitised
• Floors – vacuumed and mopped (although the mopping is the most crucial part)
• Rubber mats – vacuumed and mopped
• Windows and window ledges – sanitised
• Bins – emptied and bleached
• Tables – sanitised (probably only applicable if you have set up sanitising stations in your corridors)

Toilets

Hopefully, diligent toilet cleaning has been a longtime practice within your school, and isn’t something you’ve adopted in response to Covid!

It goes without saying that school toilets are potential hotbeds for germs, but we’ll point it out nonetheless. And without getting too graphic, Coronavirus-related studies have shown that the virus lives on human waste and can therefore be transmitted.

Daily focus areas:

• Toilet bowls and seats – bleached
• Toilet roll holders – sanitised
• Cubicle doors, door handles and locks – sanitised
• Urinals – bleached
• Sinks and taps – bleached
• Soap dispensers – sanitised
• Bins – emptied and bleached
• Walls – wiped down
• Tiles – bleached
• Windows – wiped down
• Main door and door handles – sanitised (both inner handle and outer handle)

Classrooms

Your pupils and staff spend longer single periods of time in classrooms than they do in any other areas of your school. 

As such, you need to make sure that these rooms are thoroughly cleaned after each school day, so that they are safe to use the next day. Even if each classroom is used by one set of pupils only (as is often the case in primary schools), you still need to ensure that daily deep cleaning takes place throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, in order to minimise the risk of transmission as much as possible.

Daily focus areas:

• All doors and door handles (including cupboards) – sanitised
• Pupils’ desks – sanitised
• Teacher’s desk – sanitised
• Floors – vacuumed and mopped
• Carpets and rugs – vacuumed
• All bins – emptied and bleached
• Shared stationery and apparatus (if applicable) – sanitised
• Light switches – sanitised
• Plug sockets – sanitised

Gymnasiums and Halls

Your school will likely be holding off on hosting large assemblies and conducting indoor P.E. lessons this year (or until there is a widespread Coronavirus vaccine), but there is still a good chance that the gyms and large halls will be used in some capacity or other.

Daily focus areas:

• Floors – swept or vacuumed, and then mopped thoroughly from end to end
• Doors – wiped down
• Door handles – sanitised at least once a day
• Sports equipment – wiped down if used, and ideally stowed away afterwards

If there are changing rooms attached to your gymnasium(s), these must be cleaned thoroughly whenever used. Take the same approach as the toilet guidance above, taking extra care to bleach toilets, taps, showers, tiles and any other appropriate surfaces, as well as mopping the floors with 

Staffrooms and Offices

By now, your staff will no doubt be well versed in Covid precautions, so your staffroom(s) should not be too much of a drain on cleaning resources. Again, having hand-sanitising stations on both sides of the staffroom door should be a given, but also include wipes for staff to wipe down surfaces such as kitchen counters, kettles and fridge doors as they go along. 

This doesn’t mean that your cleaners can skip the staffroom(s) on their rounds; it just means that your staff are minimising the spread among each other.

Daily focus areas:

• Doors and door handles – sanitised
• Windows and window sills – dusted and wiped down
• Cupboards, bookcases and other storage furniture – dusted and wiped down
• Shared computers, TVs and electrical appliances – wiped down
• Kitchen worktops – wiped down and sanitised
• Kitchen appliances (e.g. toasters and kettles) – sanitised
• Tables and chairs – wiped down
• Tabletops – sanitised
• Crockery and cutlery – washed in hot soapy water
• Staffroom toilets – thoroughly cleaned and bleached (as per the previous general guidance on toilet cleaning)
• Floors – swept, vacuumed and mopped
• Carpets / rugs – vacuumed and spot cleaned if necessary

Key School Cleaning Tips to Take Away

• Install sanitising stations all across the school – Although this is not related directly to cleaning, and is more about hygiene, we feel that it is worth pointing out here. Over the coming months, the perception of cleanliness is going to be just as important as actual cleanliness when it comes to making your pupils and your staff feel safe. One way to ensure that safety – and the appearance of it – is by taking the established common sense precautions against Coronavirus, including hand sanitiser and the option of wearing masks.
• Don’t forget the floors – You are right to prioritise the ‘obvious’ surfaces that people are likely to touch with their hands (or breathe on), but floors can also harbour germs. We all touch our shoes when putting them on each morning, and then we go walking around on a variety of surfaces such as stone floors, tile floors, carpeting and more.
• Make use of signage – As anyone who’s worked in a school knows, children are tactile. In primary especially, they are tactile with each other, not to mention with staff, and with pretty much every surface they come across. And although most children will now understand the principles of social distancing, they might not be as cautious when it comes to surfaces. As such, putting up signage around school, carefully worded to remind pupils not to touch surfaces unless necessary, might help greatly.
• Remember who it’s for – It’s easy to get frustrated by complicated processes when you work in a school, so it pays to bear in mind that all of these new cleaning procedures are designed to ensure the safety of all pupils and your colleagues, not to mention any visitors who come to school, including parents and carers.

School cleaning questions we’re often asked

How important is regular school sanitising pre-covid? 

Despite a relaxation of rules, we highly advise that sanitising stays at the forefront of each individual within any educational environment. 

Aside from daily school cleaning or even just an added emphasis on keeping the school visually clean, it’s crucial that both staff and pupils alike understand the importance of continued sanitisation, whether Covid-related or otherwise. 

Are school cleaning schedules the same for secondary schools and colleges as they are for primary schools?

Whilst each school cleaning checklist will have its ‘staples’, what any educational institution requires can vary dependant on size and scope. 

Can this cleaning checklist be used by janitorial staff? 

Whilst this checklist can be used by internal staff, it is more of an outline for a cleaning team. However, this checklist as a printed PDF or download can be very handy to internal teams to ensure point them in the right direction when it comes to cleaning types required for individual rooms e.g. how to approach the staffroom versus the gymnasium 

Contact SMC Premier Cleaning to Protect Your School

We provide professional, cost-effective cleaning solutions for a variety of schools and colleges across the country. In each case, our services are always tailored to the institution’s needs – whether that’s after-hours cleaning on a daily basis, deep cleans during the weekends, ‘term time only’ contracts, or any other specific request.

Our team can work with you to customise a contract that works best for your school and your budget. If you already have a cleaning contract with another company, we can take a look at what you are getting from them and will identify ways to make it more efficient. We know how crucial it is for all kinds of educational institutions to maximise budget, so we will always look to help you economise further

Find out more on our School Cleaning Services page.

We are a family-run business that has grown organically since starting out in 1982, simply by focusing on superb service. That principle still guides our company today, and we now have grown into the SMC Premier group, with contract cleaning still as much of a focus now as it was when we started. 

Contact us with your enquiry today, or give us a call on 0161 282 6444.