Childcare centres
Childcare Centre Cleaning
Everything in the room gets touched, mouthed and sat on, and almost none of it is at adult height. We clean overnight, with no children on the premises, by WWCC-cleared cleaners, on a scope written at the height children actually live at.
- Scoped at child height: table undersides, chair rungs, low walls
- Nappy-change area is its own zone with its own equipment
- Low-odour chemistry, applied at label contact time
- WWCC-cleared and police-checked, numbers supplied
What is actually behind the quote
Every line here is documented. Ask, and the paperwork is in your inbox before the first shift rather than after you chase it.
- $20m public liability
- Certificate of currency on request
- Police-checked cleaners
- WWCC where children are on site
- No lock-in contract
- Fixed written price within 24 hours
How is a childcare centre cleaned?
Clean Best cleans childcare centres overnight, with no children on the premises, using WWCC-cleared and police-checked cleaners. The scope is written at child height as well as adult height: the undersides of low tables, chair legs and rungs, toy shelving and shelf edges, cot frames and rails, mats, cubbies and their hooks, door handles at child height, and the wall for the first metre off the floor.
The nappy-change area is cleaned as its own zone with its own equipment and its own sequence — bench, mat, bin and lid, wall, step, basin and taps — and nothing that has been used elsewhere in the centre is used in it.
Products are low-odour and are applied and left for the contact time on their own label before being wiped, with surfaces children mouth rinsed or wiped down with water where the label calls for it. Hard toys are sanitised in batches on a rotation. Soft toys and fabric items require laundering, not surface cleaning, and Clean Best will not spray disinfectant onto them.
- A scope per industryWritten for your venue type, not copied from the last client
- $20m public liabilityCertificate of currency before the first shift
- Sydney and NSW onlyOne depot at Seven Hills. We do not work interstate.
- Written quote in 24 hoursFixed price, no lock-in contract
The detail
Nearly everything that matters in a childcare centre is below your knee
Childcare centre cleaning has a peculiar failure mode. The centre looks immaculate. The benches gleam, the floors are spotless, the sink is perfect. And the room has not really been cleaned, because everything that matters in a childcare centre is somewhere between the floor and about a metre up, and a cleaner working from adult habit never goes there.
A note on scope, before anything else. This page does not tell you what your obligations are — not the framework, not the regulator, not what an assessment looks at. That is your world and you know it far better than a cleaning contractor ever will. What follows is what Clean Best does.
Get down to a metre and look again
The underside of a low table is directly above the face of a crawling child for hours a day, and it is almost never cleaned, because you have to physically get under it to see it. The rung of a small chair is where every hand goes. The edge of a toy shelf is gripped by every child who pulls themselves up on it. The first metre of wall is leaned on, touched, and occasionally licked. The low door handle. The cubby hook. The skirting.
None of that is on a standard commercial cleaning scope, because a standard commercial cleaning scope was written for a room full of adults who touch things at chest height. Ours are written from a metre off the floor, and we walk the rooms that way at the quote — which looks slightly ridiculous and is the single most useful thing we do in a centre.
The nappy-change area is not part of “bathrooms”
On a generic scope it usually is, and that one line of a document is the worst thing in it. It means the bench where an infant is laid down may be getting wiped with a cloth that was in a toilet a few minutes earlier. Nobody decided that. It just follows from folding two very different zones into one line item and letting the person with the trolley work out the rest.
On our scopes the nappy-change area is its own zone: its own cloths, its own sequence, and a named list — the bench, the mat, the bin, the bin lid, the wall behind it, the step, the basin, the taps. Nothing that has been anywhere else in the centre comes near it. It is the highest-consequence square metre in the building and it gets treated like it.
What the room smells like at seven in the morning
Whatever was used at ten the night before is still there at seven, and at seven a room fills with small children who will spend nine hours in it. A strongly-scented product does not read as “clean” in a childcare centre. It reads as a chemical smell in a room full of children, and every educator notices it even when nobody mentions it.
Low-odour products, applied for the contact time on the label — because a disinfectant wiped off after two seconds has done nothing — and then rinsed or wiped down with water on the surfaces children put in their mouths, where the label calls for it. If your centre has a policy about what may be used, bring it to the walkthrough. We will work to it, and we will tell you honestly if we think something in it will not do the job.
Toys, and the thing we will not do
Hard toys get sanitised on a rotation, in batches, so that a room is never without toys when the doors open — and rinsed where the product requires it, because a child is going to chew it.
Soft toys and fabric items cannot be surface-cleaned. Spraying a disinfectant onto a plush toy puts chemical into fabric that will end up in a child’s mouth and removes essentially nothing. It is worse than doing nothing, because it looks like something was done. Soft items need laundering. We will agree at the walkthrough whether that is our work, your staff’s, or a laundry service’s — but we will not stand there with a spray bottle and pretend.
Call 1300 494 983. We will come after the last child has been picked up and we will walk the rooms at the height they are actually used at.
The difference
What a general cleaner gets wrong in a childcare centre
Four failures. The first is invisible, the third is the one that would horrify a parent, and none of them are anybody's fault — nobody was told.
Cleaning at adult height
The bench gets wiped, the sink is spotless, and the underside of the low table — which is directly above a crawling child's face all day — has not been touched in a year. Neither has the chair rung, the shelf edge, or the first metre of wall.
What we do instead: The scope is written at child height as well as adult height: undersides of low tables, chair legs and rungs, shelf edges, cubby hooks, low door handles, and the wall for the first metre off the floor.
Strong-smelling product used the night before
The room smells of chemical at seven in the morning, when thirty small children with developing airways arrive to spend nine hours in it. Educators open the windows and nobody says anything, but everyone notices.
What we do instead: Low-odour products only, applied at label contact time, with surfaces children mouth rinsed or wiped down with water where the product label calls for it. If your centre has a policy on chemistry, we work to it.
The nappy-change bench cleaned with the bathroom cloth
It is the single highest-consequence surface in the building, and it has just been wiped with something that was in a toilet ten minutes ago. This is invisible and it is exactly the sort of thing that gets folded into a line item reading 'bathrooms'.
What we do instead: The nappy-change area is its own zone with its own equipment and its own sequence — bench, mat, bin, bin lid, wall, step, basin, taps — and it is never cleaned with anything that has been elsewhere.
Disinfectant sprayed onto a plush toy
Soft toys cannot be surface-cleaned. Spraying one puts chemical into fabric that a child will put in their mouth, and removes nothing. It is worse than doing nothing at all, because it looks like something was done.
What we do instead: Hard toys are sanitised in batches on a rotation, and rinsed where the product requires it. Soft items need laundering, and we agree at the walkthrough whose job that is rather than pretending a spray bottle solves it.
What's included
What we clean in your centre
A typical overnight scope, room by room. Yours is written from the walkthrough — this is the shape it usually takes.
- Low tables — tops AND undersides — plus chair seats, backs, legs and rungs
- Toy shelving including shelf edges, unit sides and the gap behind the unit
- Cot frames, rails, bases and mattress covers on the agreed cycle
- Cubbies, cubby hooks, bag rails and the shelf above them
- Door handles at child height as well as adult height; light switches; the first metre of wall
- Nappy-change zone with its own equipment: bench, mat, bin, bin lid, wall, step, basin, taps
- Child bathrooms: low pans, low basins, taps, mirrors, step stools and the floor around them
- Hard toys sanitised in batches on rotation, rinsed where the product label calls for it
- Mats, soft flooring and rugs vacuumed; spot-cleaned as needed
- Hard floors mopped with low-odour product, finishing dry before the first educator arrives
- Kitchen: benches, sink, taps, splashback, fridge exterior, microwave interior, bins
- Staff room, office and adult bathroom
- Empty all bins including nappy bins; replace liners; clean bin lids and surrounds
- Rotation: high dusting, vents, blinds, skirtings, and the outdoor entry and sign-in area
Soft toys and fabric items are laundered, not surface-cleaned — we agree at the walkthrough whose responsibility that is. Carpet extraction, deep floor programs and a full toy sanitising pass go onto a closure day or a weekend and are quoted separately, because an overnight window does not give soft flooring enough drying time.
Access
When a childcare centre can actually be cleaned
Overnight, empty, finished before the first educator arrives. And anything needing drying time goes onto a closure day rather than being forced into a night.
| Area | When we clean it | Why that window |
|---|---|---|
| All rooms | Overnight, no children on the premises | Rooms cannot be cleaned around children, and the chemistry is not something anyone wants near them. The centre is empty or we are not there. |
| Nappy-change area | Its own zone, its own sequence, its own equipment | The highest-consequence surface in the building. Nothing that has been anywhere else in the centre goes near it. |
| Hard toys | Batch rotation overnight | Done in batches so a room is never without toys in the morning, and rinsed where the product label calls for it. |
| Soft flooring and mats | Nightly vacuum; extraction on a closure day | Extraction needs drying time that an overnight window does not have. It goes on a closure day, not into a normal night. |
| Deep clean and toy sanitising pass | Closure day or weekend | It needs the rooms emptied and time. It does not fit in an overnight and we will not pretend it does. |
Pricing
A centre is quoted from the rooms and the age groups, not the floor area
What drives the work is how many rooms there are, which age groups are in them, how much soft flooring there is, and whether there is a cot room and a nappy-change area. Square metres barely feature.
Small centre
One or two rooms, a shared bathroom, a small kitchen, no cot room.
- Overnight clean by a WWCC-cleared, police-checked cleaner
- Child-height scope: table undersides, chair rungs, shelf edges, low walls
- Nappy-change area as its own zone with its own equipment
- Low-odour chemistry, applied at label contact time
Fixed price, in writing, before anyone starts.
Long day care centre
Multiple rooms across age groups, a cot room, a nappy-change area, a kitchen and an outdoor space.
- Room-by-room scope written for the age group in each
- Hard toys sanitised in batches on a written rotation
- Cot frames, rails and mattress covers on the agreed cycle
- Named supervisor and a written monthly audit against the scope
Fixed price, in writing, before anyone starts.
Group or large centre
A multi-site operator, or a large centre with high room counts and a closure-day program.
- Periodic program scheduled into your closure days and holidays
- Carpet extraction and hard-floor work with real drying time
- One supervisor, one site register and one consolidated invoice
- WWCC and police-check numbers, insurance certificates supplied up front
Fixed price, in writing, before anyone starts.
Free walkthrough of your premises, then a written quote within 24 hours.
How it works
How we take over a childcare centre clean
Four steps, and the walkthrough is done on our knees. It looks odd. It is the point.
- 1
Ring us and describe the rooms
Call 1300 494 983. How many rooms, which age groups, whether there is a cot room and a nappy-change area, and what your centre's chemistry policy is.
- 2
We walk it after the last child leaves
At the end of a full day, when the rooms look the way they actually look. And we walk them at child height, because that is where the job is.
- 3
A scope written at child height
Within 24 hours: one fixed figure and a room-by-room task list, with the nappy-change zone and the toy rotation written in as their own items.
- 4
The same WWCC-cleared cleaner
Inducted on your centre before their first shift, starting on the agreed date, with a supervisor auditing monthly against the written scope.
FAQ
Childcare centre cleaning questions
What directors and centre managers ask us before they change contractors.
What is included in childcare centre cleaning?
Clean Best cleans a childcare centre at the height children actually live at. That means low tables and their undersides, chair legs and rungs, toy shelving including the shelf edges, cot frames and rails, mats and soft flooring, cubbies and their hooks, door handles at child height as well as adult height, and the wall for the first metre off the floor. Then the nappy-change area, the bathrooms with their low pans and low basins, and the kitchen. The adult-height surfaces are the easy part.
Are your cleaners WWCC-cleared?
Yes. Every Clean Best cleaner working in a childcare centre holds a current Working with Children Check as well as a police check, and is inducted on the centre before their first shift. We will give you the numbers rather than assure you they exist. If a relief cleaner is ever needed, they hold the same clearances and have been inducted on your centre — nobody works a site they have not been inducted on.
When do you clean a childcare centre?
Overnight, with no children on the premises. Clean Best does not clean rooms while children are in them: it is impractical, the chemistry is not something anybody wants near a child, and it is not the job. The clean happens after the last child leaves and finishes before the first educator arrives. Anything that needs longer — carpet extraction, deep floor work, a full toy sanitising pass — goes onto a closure day or a weekend as a separate periodic program.
What chemistry do you use around children?
Clean Best uses low-odour products in childcare centres and works from the labels rather than from habit. Everything is applied and left for the contact time the label states before it is wiped, and surfaces children mouth are cleaned and then rinsed or wiped down with water where the product label calls for it. If your centre has a policy about what may and may not be used on its surfaces, tell us at the walkthrough and we will work to it — and we will tell you if we think something in it will not do the job.
Do you clean the toys?
Hard toys, yes, on an agreed rotation — sanitised in batches so that a room is never without toys, and rinsed where the product requires it. Soft toys and fabric items are a different problem: they need laundering rather than surface cleaning, and we will agree with you at the walkthrough whether that is our work, your staff's or a laundry service's. What we will not do is spray a disinfectant onto a plush toy and hand it back, which is worse than doing nothing.
How do you handle the nappy-change area?
As its own zone, with its own equipment, cleaned in its own sequence, and never with a cloth or a mop that has been anywhere else in the centre. The bench, the mat, the bin and its lid, the wall behind the bench, the step, the basin and the taps are all named items on the scope. It is the highest-consequence square metre in a childcare centre and it is the one most often folded into 'bathrooms' on a generic scope.
What does childcare centre cleaning cost?
Clean Best does not publish a price. What drives the workload in a centre is the number of rooms, the age groups in them, the amount of soft flooring, whether there is a cot room and a nappy-change area, and the standard the centre holds itself to. Floor area barely features. We walk the centre after the last child leaves and confirm one fixed figure in writing within 24 hours, with no lock-in contract.
Keep exploring
Other premises we write a dedicated scope for
Each venue type gets its own scope, its own equipment and its own sequence.
Book childcare centre cleaning that was written at child height
Free walkthrough after the last pick-up, by WWCC-cleared cleaners. Fixed written quote in 24 hours. No lock-in contract. Call 1300 494 983.