Three questions worth asking your current cleaning contractor

1. Can we have a current copy of our scope?

Not the version attached to the contract three years ago. The one your cleaners are working to this term.

A good contractor sends it back the same day, and it reflects the buildings as they are now. A contractor who takes a week, or sends something that does not mention the building you opened last year, is telling you the scope and the actual work have drifted apart. That gap is where complaints come from.

2. Who cleaned our school last night?

A simple question with a revealing answer. You are not checking up on individuals — you are finding out whether your contractor knows.

A contractor with proper attendance systems answers immediately. One who has to ring the supervisor and call you back has a visibility problem, and if they cannot tell you who was on site, they cannot tell you when someone was not.

The follow-up is the useful one: how many of those people were also here last term?

3. Can we see the last three inspection reports?

Most cleaning contracts specify inspections. Far fewer actually produce reports the school ever sees.

You are looking for three things. That they exist. That they are dated across three different weeks rather than written in a batch after you asked. And that they contain findings — an inspection that scores everything at 100% every time is not an inspection.

What the answers mean

Any contractor should manage all three comfortably. If yours cannot, the issue is not usually the cleaners. It is that nobody above them is checking, which means standards depend entirely on individual staff rather than on a system — and that holds only until someone leaves.