How do you prepare a school for cleaning before the new term?

The school calendar offers only one window, and it is narrow. Here is the sequence that works, counting back from the new term.

• Week −6, in June. Site visit with the head teacher or bursar, while the school is still operating: it is the only time the real wear, the damaged zones and the friction points can be seen. Surfaces are surveyed zone by zone, along with floor coverings and the number of sanitary blocks. Quote issued within 48 hours.
• Week −5. Quote approved and the slot booked. This is the critical point: every school in the same city wants the same fortnight in August, and a contractor's capacity is not elastic.
• Weeks −4 to −2. The work itself, on an empty building. Duration depends on floor area and the level of wear; a medium-sized school takes several consecutive days, not one night.
• Week −1. Joint inspection with the management, checklist worked through zone by zone, non-conforming points corrected.
• New term. The school is handed back before the teachers arrive, so they can set up their classrooms in an already-clean building.

Three weeks is rarely enough, for a logistical reason: the quote is barely approved before the slot is already gone.

The order isn't a matter of preference, it's a matter of recontamination: a zone cleaned first will be dirtied again by the zones cleaned afterwards.

The sequence that works:

1. Roof spaces, suspended ceilings, light fittings, ducts and high areas. Everything at height is treated first, because everything that falls from it lands lower down.
2. Glazing and joinery. Water and frame dust run down onto sills and floors.
3. Sanitary areas, treated as an isolated zone, with equipment that never leaves that zone. This is the longest task and the most closely judged.
4. Furniture, moved out of the classrooms where possible, or shifted half a room at a time.
5. Classroom floors.
6. Corridors, stairs and halls, which serve as the traffic route for the whole job and are therefore treated near the end.
7. Outdoor areas, playground and covered yard, last, or in parallel with a separate team if the site allows it.

One rule cuts across all of this, and it is absolute: the clean-equipment circuit and the dirty-equipment circuit never cross. A trolley coming out of a sanitary block does not go into a classroom without a complete change of cloths and microfibres.

This is the item that decides how the school looks overall, and the one where quotes diverge the most.

What is actually found: a grey film made up of mineral dust, rubber, chalk or felt-tip powder, food residue and, above all, a build-up of cleaning products that were never properly rinsed off — this last point accounts for most of the dullness. Add the black marks left by shoe soles and chair legs.

What calls for stripping: ceramic tiling or resilient flooring covered in a build-up of layers. Stripping is done with a low-speed rotary machine and the pad matched to the hardness of the surface, never the most aggressive pad by default. The full reasoning is in our article on choosing the right rotary-machine pad.

What does not call for it: a floor worn through to the substrate, a lifted sheet of resilient flooring, tiling with a hollowed-out joint, a deep scratch. Stripping repairs nothing; it only removes what sits on top. A serious contractor says so at the survey stage rather than after invoicing, and then only prices what can genuinely be improved.

What is to be avoided: black soap as a finishing product for a glossy look. It leaves a greasy film that picks up dust from the first day of school, and the whole cycle starts again exactly as before.

This is the most underestimated item in a school quote, because it isn't measured in square metres but in units.

A class of thirty pupils has thirty tables and thirty chairs — sixty pieces, each with a top, a frame, crossbars and end caps. Multiply that by the number of classrooms.

What the treatment covers:

• the tabletop, degreased, with marker, glue and tape residue removed,
• the underside of the tabletop, where chewing gum and stuck-on paper build up,
• the frame and crossbars, which carry most of the black marks,
• end caps and glides, whose condition affects both noise and floor scratches.

What is not cleaning: tightening loose fixings, replacing glides, repainting a rusted frame. That is maintenance; it can be scheduled within the same window but with a different contractor, and it must be done before the clean, never after.

The fabric chairs in the staff room, the head teacher's office or the meeting room call for a different technique, injection-extraction, and a drying time that has to fit into the schedule before term starts.

A school imposes two constraints that other buildings do not, and neither is negotiable.

No residue on the floor. Children, especially in nursery classes, are in direct, prolonged contact with the floor. Any product left unrinsed stays there. The rule is therefore systematic rinsing after every treatment, and no finish intended purely to add shine.

An airing period before reopening. Stripping, floor treatment or heavy disinfection release volatile compounds. The building must be ventilated and that period has to appear on the schedule, which means the work cannot finish the day before term starts.

Two further points:

• Safety data sheets for the products used are handed over to the school. It's a document any inspecting body will ask for.
• Dosing is done with a dilution station or a doser, never by eye. Overdosing does not clean better, it just leaves more residue.

A school clean ends with a document, not a phone call.

The handover is done with the head teacher or the bursar, zone by zone, checklist in hand. Each point is either ticked off or logged as a written reservation, with a deadline for correction. That reservation should be corrected free of charge: it is a commitment to have written into the contract before the work starts.

What must appear on the handover report:

• the zones treated and the zones explicitly excluded from the scope,
• points recorded as not improvable — a worn floor, damaged furniture, a hollowed-out joint — noting that they were already in that state before the work,
• the airing periods to be respected,
• the list of products used.

What nobody budgets for, and which comes back every year: a follow-up visit in October. The first six weeks of term reveal what the empty building had hidden, and above all they put sanitary facilities back into use that had sat idle since June. Scheduling a catch-up visit in mid-October costs far less than letting it run until the next holidays.

If the summer included building work — painting, tiling, partitions — the clean that follows is post-construction cleaning, one of EPUREVA's four services. For offices or a shop, it is listed at 20 MAD/m² incl. VAT on standard tiles and 30 MAD/m² incl. VAT on other floors, with a 3,000 MAD incl. VAT minimum; prices are indicative and confirmed after photos or a visit.

It requires every tradesperson to have finished, rubble to have been removed — we do not clear out — and water and electricity to be available: the details are here.