Term-time cleaning and school-holiday deep cleans for primary schools, high schools and independent colleges across Greater Sydney. Classrooms, canteens, amenities blocks, halls, libraries and admin wings — cleaned by directly employed staff who are cleared to be on a school site.
School cleaning covers classrooms, corridors, amenities blocks, canteens, halls, libraries and admin areas, split into a daily term-time service and a scoped deep clean each term break. Cleaners must hold a current Working With Children Check. Pro Clean Corp publishes a guide of $2,500 to $5,500 per month for a primary school of 10 to 20 classrooms cleaned five days a week, with every site quoted after a walk-through.
A school is not one building type, it is six or seven sharing a fence line. A single site will combine teaching spaces with a commercial kitchen, a sports hall, a science block with fume cabinets and sinks, an administration wing that behaves like an office, and an amenities block that takes more foot traffic in a fifteen-minute recess than a small office takes in a week. A cleaning contract that treats all of that as one flat scope will always over-serve the quiet rooms and under-serve the pressure points.
The way we scope a Sydney school is by traffic and by risk rather than by square metre. Toilets, canteen, sick bay and the main circulation routes sit on a daily non-negotiable list. Classrooms and staff rooms sit on a daily list with a lighter touch. Libraries, halls, music rooms and outdoor covered areas rotate on a weekly or fortnightly cycle. Anything above head height, anything that needs a machine, and anything that needs the room to be empty gets pushed into the term breaks, where it can be done properly instead of squeezed into ninety minutes after the last bell.
If your site is part of a wider campus or you also run an out-of-school-hours care service on the same grounds, it is usually cheaper and cleaner administratively to scope them together. Our broader education cleaning service covers campuses that mix schooling, care and community hire under one schedule.
Classrooms. The daily pass is desks and desk edges, chairs stacked or reset, whiteboard trays, light switches, door handles and door plates, sinks and taps in rooms that have them, bins emptied and liners replaced, and floors vacuumed or dust-mopped and spot-mopped. Reading corners and mats in infants rooms get more attention than a secondary classroom because they are floor-contact surfaces. Vinyl in kindergarten rooms shows scuffing faster than anywhere else in the school and needs a scheduled buff rather than harder mopping.
Canteen. Treated as a food premises, because that is what it is. Servery, benches, sinks, the hand-wash basin and its consumables, floor and floor waste, bins, and appliance handles and seals daily. Shelving, under-bench, behind-equipment, exhaust filters and cool-room floors periodically. Cleaning equipment used in the canteen is colour-coded and never crosses into the toilet blocks.
Amenities. This is where a school cleaning contract is won or lost, because it is the only part parents hear about. Pans, urinals, cisterns, seats, basins, taps, mirrors, partition walls and the backs of doors are cleaned daily, floors are machine-scrubbed rather than mopped on a set cycle, and floor wastes are flushed rather than wiped around. Dispensers are checked at every visit. Odour in a school toilet block almost always traces to a dry floor waste or a urinal trap rather than to the pans, which is why a mop-and-go service never fixes it.
The NSW school year gives you four predictable windows where the buildings are empty, and the schools that get the most out of a cleaning budget plan around them rather than reacting to them. Term time is maintenance: keep the surfaces safe, keep the amenities stocked, keep the floors from degrading. The breaks are recovery: get the carpet back, get the vinyl sealed, get the high dusting and the light diffusers done, get the walls washed in the corridors that have been fingerprinted since February.
A typical break scope includes hot-water carpet extraction through classrooms and the library, hard-floor strip and reseal in the highest-wear rooms, high dusting of ledges, vents and pipework, internal glass and window frames, full amenities descale, and a canteen deep clean behind and under fixed equipment. The long December to January break is where strip-and-seal work belongs because the floor gets the cure time it needs; the shorter breaks suit extraction, high dusting and glass.
Deep cleans are quoted as project work rather than rolled into the hourly contract, so the school can see exactly what it is buying and drop or defer a line if the budget moves. Ongoing scheduled work is quoted at $30 to $45 per hour and one-off project work at $40 to $50 per hour, both published on our commercial cleaning prices page.
Anyone working in child-related work in NSW needs a current Working With Children Check, and a school cleaner working during or adjacent to school hours is squarely in that category. Every cleaner we roster onto a school site holds a current WWCC and a National Police Check, and we hold the clearance numbers centrally so your business manager can verify them against the Office of the Children's Guardian register rather than taking a contractor's word for it.
Beyond the paperwork, the practical protection is roster stability. A rotating pool of unfamiliar faces is a child-safety problem as much as a quality problem: nobody at the front office knows who should be on site, and the cleaner does not know which store rooms are out of bounds. We name the cleaners assigned to your school, brief them on your child protection policy and your sign-in system, and give you notice before a replacement attends rather than sending one unannounced.
The same standard applies to early learning sites. If your school runs an attached preschool or you are comparing providers for a separate centre, our childcare centre cleaning service runs the same clearance and roster discipline against the National Quality Framework.
Schools concentrate respiratory and gastrointestinal illness the way few other buildings do, and the cleaning response is not exotic. It is frequency on the surfaces hands actually touch. Door handles and push plates, tap handles, shared keyboards and tablets, sports equipment, handrails, bubbler buttons and the light switches by every doorway carry more transmission risk than the middle of a classroom floor. A touch-point pass during the day does more for illness control than a longer clean after hours.
Product choice matters in an environment full of children. Disinfectants used across teaching and play areas should be listed on the Australian Register of Therapeutic Goods for the claim being made, applied at the label dilution and given the contact time the label specifies. A surface wiped and immediately dried has not been disinfected regardless of what was in the bottle. We work to label contact times and keep dilution control on the cleaner's trolley rather than trusting a free pour.
Spills of blood or bodily fluid are handled under a documented spill procedure with a dedicated kit, not with the general mop. Chemicals are stored locked and out of reach, Safety Data Sheets are kept on site, and no decanted product travels around a school in an unlabelled bottle.
A useful quote starts with a walk-through, ideally with the business manager or facilities lead, and it should end with a written scope that names frequency per area rather than a single hourly figure. Bring the site plan, the number of amenities blocks and pans, the floor surface mix, the hours the buildings are accessible, and whether the hall is hired out to community groups after hours — external hire is the single most commonly missed variable in a school cleaning scope.
Our contracts are month-to-month with 30 days written notice and no lock-in term, which matters for a school because you are usually committing across a school year while the budget is approved term by term. If you want the cost drivers broken down before you go to the market, the school cleaning prices guide sets out how area, frequency and amenities count change the figure.
Call 1300 494 983 or request a walk-through online. We come back with a written fixed-price scope you can put in front of a P&C or a finance committee.
Current WWCC and National Police Check for every rostered cleaner.
The same cleaners each week, with notice before any replacement.
Frequency named per area, not one hourly rate for the whole site.
Yes. Every member of our school cleaning team holds a current Working With Children Check and has completed a National Police Check before being rostered onto a school site. Clearances are reviewed on a rolling basis so nothing lapses mid-contract, and we can provide WWCC numbers to your business manager for verification against the NSW Office of the Children’s Guardian register before the first shift.
Yes. Some Sydney schools keep an in-house cleaner for daily work and bring us in only for the four term breaks. A holiday-only engagement is quoted as a scoped project rather than an hourly contract: carpet extraction, hard-floor strip and seal, high dusting, light diffusers, window and glass detail, and a full amenities reset while the buildings are empty. We schedule around maintenance trades so we are not cleaning a floor a contractor is about to work over.
School cleaning is quoted per site after a walk-through, not from a rate card. As a published guide, Pro Clean Corp lists a primary school of 10 to 20 classrooms cleaned five days a week at $2,500 to $5,500 per month on our commercial cleaning prices page. Ongoing scheduled commercial contracts run at $30 to $45 per hour, and one-off work such as a holiday deep clean is quoted at $40 to $50 per hour. Your actual figure depends on floor area, the number of amenities blocks and how much of the site is carpet.
A school canteen is a food business and is inspected as one. The daily scope covers benches, servery, sinks, hand-wash basin and its soap and paper supply, floor and floor waste, bins and bin area, fridge and freezer door seals and handles, and the microwave and warming units. Periodic work covers shelving, under-bench and behind-equipment cleaning, exhaust filters and cool room floors. We keep canteen colour-coded equipment separate from the equipment used in toilets and classrooms.
Yes, and it is how most Sydney schools run the contract. Classrooms, libraries and staff areas are cleaned after the final bell or before roll call. Toilets, high-traffic corridors and the canteen usually need a daytime touch-point service as well, which we run as a short mid-morning and post-lunch pass by a nominated cleaner who is already known to the office and signed into the visitor system.
We can supply and restock them, or work from stock the school buys under its own purchasing arrangement. Whichever way it is set up, the contract should name who is responsible for reordering, because the single most common complaint in a school amenities block is an empty dispenser rather than a dirty one. If we hold the supply we track consumption per block and top up before a run-out rather than on request.
Written scope by area and frequency, month-to-month with 30 days notice, WWCC-cleared teams.