Have you ever felt that your cleaning team is overlooked in the school’s hierarchy? Do you sometimes feel that your professional contributions to the school’s daily operations aren’t fully recognised, with concerns dismissed as just routine cleaning tasks?
The truth is your cleaning team’s efforts are crucial. Your team makes the school more efficient, saves money on long-term maintenance, improves the school’s reputation, and bolsters students’ academic success.
But it’s hard to prove your worth to management without hard facts and figures. We’ve written this article to help you prove why a clean environment is so crucial for schools. It’s time that your management acknowledges how your work impacts the entire campus.
How Does a Clean Environment Affect Learning and School Reputation?
What your management team might not know is that cleanliness is an indirect driver of business and educational success.
A clean campus creates a positive first impression on prospective parents and students when they visit on open days. Also, cleanliness impacts things like student health and attendance rates which directly affect students’ academic success – one of the key metrics parents consider when comparing schools.
We’re here to ensure your crucial role in your school’s success doesn’t go unnoticed. In this article, you’ll find advice for achieving a truly clean learning environment by addressing every critical area – from floors, furniture, walls, and ceilings to indoor air quality. You’ll discover practical techniques and tailored methods for managing different surfaces and levels of soiling, ensuring that every space meets high standards.
This guide also provides targeted solutions for high-risk areas like cafeterias and washrooms and offers strategies to handle high staff turnover through effective training and automated systems that reduce errors and maintain consistency. Finally, you’ll learn how to future-proof your school with smart, sustainable cleaning practices that extend asset life, lower costs, and enhance infection control. This comprehensive approach is designed to help you showcase the true value of your work.
Now, let’s dive deeper into how to achieve a clean learning environment by addressing every critical area.
How to Achieve a Clean Learning Environment by Addressing All Areas
A clean learning environment might seem to be one that’s merely cleared of rubbish and doesn’t have visible soiling. But with the constant foot traffic and daily use of school facilities by students and staff, keeping spaces clean requires ongoing effort and effective strategies. To prove your value to the management team, you’re going to need a truly clean learning environment, and that encompasses a lot:
- Floors
- Furniture
- Walls & ceilings
- Indoor air
But don’t be intimidated – a few adjustments to your cleaning routines will keep students and staff healthy and hard-working. To achieve this, each area of the school requires a tailored approach, starting from the ground up.
Floors
Let’s start with your approach to floors. Floor cleaning can be frustrating because however hard you try, the school’s daily foot traffic puts back the dirt you just removed. However, maintaining clean floors is essential – not only to prevent slips and falls but also to reduce the spread of surface-borne diseases, making your efforts both necessary and impactful.
To keep floors consistently clean, it’s important to follow a thorough process and choose the right tools for the job.
The first step is identifying the type of surface you’re cleaning, as each surface will react differently to a cleaning method and chemical. For example, a hard, porous surface like timber flooring must be thoroughly wet when cleaning and disinfecting, to ensure the pores are cleaned. However, carpets require a different floor cleaning approach using steam cleaning, because spraying disinfectant over the top won’t penetrate the fibres.
The second step is observing what level of dirt you’re dealing with. If there are large pieces of debris on your floor, like leaves or clumps of grass, you’ll need to sweep before you start cleaning. Then, if there is stubborn visible soiling, try agitating the surface with a floor scrub, especially in tile grout or the corners of hard floors, to loosen the dirt’s hold on the surface. Then dry mop with a microfibre head to remove as much grime as possible before adding water and chemicals, so you aren’t just pushing dirty water around the floor.
Third, choose your cleaning chemicals carefully to suit your surface. Using the wrong products can damage school assets, leading to issues like acids etching natural stone floors or alkalines removing vinyl flooring’s protective coating.
Download Veridia’s guide for cleaning different surfaces.
Furniture
For furniture, you should also solve for the surface, level of soiling, and chemical in order. However, furniture, from the classroom to washrooms and kitchens, also presents the challenge of touchpoint disinfecting. Your students and staff spend most of their day in contact with their tables and chairs, leaving germs everywhere they touch, increasing the risk that these surfaces will harbour and spread disease.
During COVID, you wiped down touchpoints every day or even between classes, but this sort of intensive approach isn’t practical in normal circumstances. Instead, you can use an anti-bacterial chemical like H25 Multi-Purpose Cleaner, which can be safely sprayed onto frequently touched surfaces and left to dry. When the surface dries, an imperceptible layer of chemical is left to continue destroying germs. This residue won’t harm the students and will prevent germs accumulating on the surface. Then, at the end of the week, you can disinfect and wipe down the tables and chairs thoroughly to remove the spray and leave the surfaces clean and ready for use.
Walls & Ceilings
While regular touchpoint cleaning is essential, a little attention to the often-overlooked areas above our heads and of immediate reach can be beneficial. Walls and ceilings can collect dust and allergens and therefore need consistent cleaning.
A regular cobweb brush is suitable for visible dirt, but for stubborn soiling or stains, use a microfibre mop with an extendable handle to dry mop the entire surface, then focus on any discoloured patches. You must dislodge any dust on the walls or in crevices because dust and pollen can exacerbate students’ allergies.
To efficiently deep clean the walls and ceiling, use a fogger to create aerosols that can be directed onto high surfaces and wiped down with an extendable mop. While foggers can be expensive, renting one may be a cost-effective option – just make sure you follow all PPE and dwell time guidance.
Indoor Air
The fourth area to address might not immediately come to mind as a cleaning concern, but it has a significant impact on student well-being and productivity – indoor air quality. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, indoor pollutant levels can be “two to five times – and occasionally more than 100 times – higher than outdoor levels.” This elevated pollution can lead to health issues such as coughing, eye irritation, and headaches, and can exacerbate asthma and other respiratory illnesses, affecting student attendance and performance.
Natural ventilation – air transfer from the outside – can be helpful, diluting the concentration of harmful particles and infectious aerosols that may be present. However, ventilation alone won’t result in completely clean air, as it doesn’t filter out harmful particles. If your air quality could have a detrimental impact on your students and staff, consider investing in an air purification system with high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters.
How to Control High-Risk Areas with Targeted School Cleaning Products
Shared school spaces that get a lot of use, such as cafeterias, sports facilities, and washrooms, are likely to get re-contaminated throughout the day as different cohorts use them. For these high-risk areas, the most common type of soiling will be organic soils – from food scraps and oils to bodily waste and sweat – which require specific cleaning chemicals to effectively break them down and remove them.
Because organic soils are acidic, you need to use alkaline cleaners and detergents to neutralize and remove them effectively. These cleaners range from low-alkaline solutions like H25 Multi-Purpose Cleaner and Sanitiser to stronger solutions like H39 Bathroom Cleaner and Sanitiser.
To solve the problem of reoccurring contamination between cleans, you can use cleaners that continually break down soil particles so they’re easier to remove. These cleaners, including H36 Enzyme Cleaner and K17 Kitchen Floor Cleaner, contain enzymes that continually break down soils without being consumed in the process. Simply apply them and leave them to dwell without wiping away, and they will keep working until the dirt is gone. This doesn’t replace disinfection but will make removing microorganisms easier.
This science-based cleaning will help you keep your school clean and infection-free.
How to Maintain Cleaning Standards in Schools with High Staff Turnover
Keeping your school clean and infection-free becomes even more challenging in schools with high staff turnover. This issue is especially prevalent between Terms 4 and 1, leaving you to repeatedly train new staff on cleaning procedures.
To ease this cycle, consider partnering with a provider who offers extensive expertise, supported by onsite visits and comprehensive online resources. These resources can streamline training and help ensure your cleaning team is always up to standard. For example, Veridia’s customers have access to our chemical safety and usage training on our website. We also provide resources from cleaning procedure wall charts to chemical usage guides and safety data sheets. All this education, taken together with the expert advice of our technical specialists, will upskill any school cleaning team.
One of our long-standing customers in the education industry, Macquarie University, said it best:
“[Veridia provided a] total end-to-end package with regards to documentation, education and delivery of product. A specific instance of this is in the professionalism and detail of the Safety Data Sheets, product safety procedures and labelling.”
Of course, training and documentation aren’t the only ways to ensure efficient cleaning, and most of the real knowledge comes on the job. But there are ways to speed up and error-proof your day-to-day cleaning as well.
An automated dilution method is available for most Veridia chemicals. Some products, such as W42 Rinse Additive for automatic dishwashers, will dispense as part of your equipment’s function. Others, especially in housekeeping, use a wall-mounted system that dispenses chemical into buckets and bottles at set dilutions. This eliminates the need for manual decanting, reducing the risk of harmful exposure and ensuring consistent cleaning dosages.
Veridia also provides some chemicals in our proprietary Plug‘n’Pump dispensing bottles, that automatically dispense correct dilutions with a quick insert-and-spray mechanism. This portable system eliminates the need for bulky dispensing equipment, reduces waste, and ensures safe, precise chemical application in any location.
One satisfied customer, the Director of Operations at Blue Mountains Grammar School, said this about Veridia:
“Not only were we getting a better product and saving money, but because of the dispensing systems installed in our cleaner’s room, the cleaning chemicals were being mixed at the correct ratio, further reducing costs and wastage.”
How to Future-Proof Your School with Smart and Sustainable Cleaning Solutions
As schools face increasing challenges and evolving needs, it’s essential to embrace innovative solutions that not only address current demands but also anticipate future ones. If we’ve learnt anything from the 2020s so far, it’s that change is inevitable, and we should be preparing for it.
One current change is the increased use of technology in schools, which should be considered when planning for future cleaning. Our experts recommend specialised cleaners like Kwiksan for sanitising these expensive pieces of equipment without risking damage. These cleaners are designed to protect sensitive surfaces while maintaining a hygienic environment for both students and staff.
Inflation has also increased in recent years, meaning your management team will need to study the financial aspect of cleaning. James P. Whittaker highlighted in the September/October 2005 issue of Facilities Manager that proper cleaning and maintenance can extend asset lifespans by 10 to 20 percent, resulting in significant cost savings.
This means that consistent cleaning decreases long-term repair and asset replacement costs. In the shorter term, using dispenser systems like Veridia’s enCap and Plug’n’Pump products can reduce expenses by cutting waste. Both long and short-term effects are likely to make your management team happy and increase your school’s profitability.
A final consideration is the increased focus on infection control and its impact on attendance and learning effectiveness. An American study from 2010 found that improved classroom hygiene may reduce the incidence of infection and thus student absenteeism.
This was supported during the pandemic when the usual outbreaks of colds and influenza didn’t happen. Kerrie, the Cleaning Supervisor at Chevalier College, maintained a COVID-free environment and saw a drop in regular student infections across the campus, when her cleaning team put in a lot of work.
A Clean Learning Environment is Every School’s Secret Advantage
A clean learning environment is essential for your school’s success. Your unassuming job has much more of an impact than you think: you’re the backbone of your school’s daily operations.
We’re here to tell you that you deserve more credit. Your hard work deserves recognition, and it’s time for your contributions to be fully appreciated. This article can help you demonstrate your value to the management team – showing just how much of an impact your work has on the overall health, safety, and success of the school.
To learn more about the techniques and products mentioned in this article, contact us here.
