Changes to school cleaning post-pandemic; what can we learn?

During the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, school children from aged 2-11 had one of the highest rates of infection of any age group. So did cleaning and hygiene standards within schools paying a contributing part?

As recent research confirms, the fact that schools reopened soonest directly effected outbreak patterns within society. So how should we alter school cleaning protocol now tests aren’t readily available?

Evidently, schools weren’t sufficiently prepared to deal with this sort of breakout on their own at the start. Moving forward, it’s clear that cleaning standards and infection prevention control need to be improved to ensure we can better protect students and staff.

While reactive deep cleans and fogging are proven to be an effective way of eliminating viruses and reducing the spread of ‘germs’ in schools, they are simply not enough to deal with new infectious viruses that spread rapidly.

This is where professional teams have the edge; maintaining high standards and the flexibility to intensify cleaning schedules in reaction to potential outbreaks.

Schools should use the most recent pandemic as a learning curve and must rigorously scrutinise the quality of their current cleaning routine to pinpoint improvement areas. In effect this means bringing in, to some degree, precautionary sanitisation of high-touch surfaces as rote.

As we have done, more cleaning companies are now offering precautionary sanitation services. This is becoming an increasingly popular way for schools to offer reassurance to parents, staff and children.

This service can be either in place of, or a ‘top up’, for any in house cleaning teams; sanitising high-touch points and high-risk areas ready for daily changeovers. Regular cleaning like this offers more robust protection against viruses and bacteria that linger on surfaces.

In terms of the cleaning chemicals themselves it’s also easy to think that the harsher a cleaning chemical the more effective it is, but the reality is that the products themselves may not be safe, with young children. This is another field where a specialised company will have the advantage, utilising the correct cleaning methods in the correct way.

Of course all of these changes are reliant on the spread not happening directly between individuals themselves. No matter how clean surfaces are if infected individuals do not follow best practice for hand washing etc, they are still likely to contribute to further spread. Vigilance and continued education of all in the education setting, teachers and pupils alike, is at least 50% of the battle.

These may seem like generic steps to follow and mostly common knowledge, however many schools are yet to reinforce them. Schools can get ahead of and pre-empt future outbreaks by implementing these practices into their school culture now.

In short, a combination of vigilant behaviour internally and proactive, targeted cleaning from professional teams is the best way to reduce the risk and allow our schools to stay open, operational and healthy.