Janitorial services for schools: a term-time building, priced across twelve months

What the companies publish

Pricing a school year rather than a school month

1. Write the term calendar into the specification. Name the term dates, the inset days and the holiday periods, and say what happens in each. A contract priced as twelve equal months against a building used for thirty-nine weeks is not wrong, but it should be a decision you made rather than an assumption you inherited.
2. Put the deep work in the holidays and price it there. Floor stripping, carpet extraction and high-level cleaning need the building empty, and a school is reliably empty several times a year. That is an advantage most commercial buildings do not have, and it belongs as its own priced line rather than as an unnamed expectation.
3. State the safeguarding requirements up front. Who is on site during the school day, what checks they hold and how they are supervised are conditions of the work rather than extras to it. They affect who can bid, so they belong in the invitation rather than in the contract after award.
4. Decide the washroom frequency by use, not by count. School washrooms are used in concentrated bursts around fixed times. Daytime attendance during and after break is a different purchase from a nightly clean, and the difference is visible to every parent who visits.
5. Name who cleans after lettings. Evening and weekend lettings generate cleaning that the day contract does not cover, and the income from the letting rarely has it costed in. Say whether it is a call-off line, an included allowance, or the hirer's responsibility.

Common questions

Are schools priced per square foot like offices?

They are often quoted that way, and it is worth treating with care. The per-square-foot figures in this record are for occupied commercial buildings on a continuous schedule; a school's schedule is not continuous, and the shape of the year is what a school-specific quote should be showing you.

Should holiday deep cleaning be in the contract or bought separately?

Either works. What does not work is leaving it unnamed, because it then arrives as a variation in the one week of the year when there is no time to procure it.

Does one contractor usually cover a multi-site trust?

Often, and it is where the buying power is. It also concentrates the risk, so the specification should say what happens at a single site when the contractor fails there rather than everywhere.

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