Childcare Cleaning Services
These are the childcare cleaning services we run for early learning providers across metropolitan Melbourne, sorted by the kind of service you operate. Long day care centres, kindergartens, early learning centres, daycare, family day care and OSHC programs each get their own scope, and two specialist services sit on top of any of them. For the wider picture, start with how Golden Star handles childcare cleaning in Melbourne.
Every service here is quoted as a fixed price in writing and carried out by cleaners holding a Victorian Working with Children Check. Nothing is handed to a general office crew who happen to be free that night: the people who learn your rooms keep cleaning them.
- WWCC checkedA current card for every cleaner
- Police checkedNational check on file
- $20M insuredPublic liability cover
- Signed logsRoom by room, each visit
Which childcare cleaning service does your centre need?
Match the childcare cleaning service to how children attend. Centres open all day need nightly cleaning built around nappy change and meal areas, sessional kinders need cleaning timed to sessions, and family day care needs a lighter scope confined to the rooms used for care.
If you run more than one type, for example a long day care centre with a funded kinder program inside it, the whole site is priced together and the log is organised by room rather than by program.
By facility type
| Facility type | When children attend | When we clean | Scope focus |
|---|---|---|---|
| Long day care centre | Most of the day, for most weeks of the year | After close, usually weeknights | Nappy change, kitchen, sleep rooms |
| Kindergarten (sessional) | Set sessions during school terms | After the final session of the day | Shared rooms, outdoor play, changeover between groups |
| Early learning centre | Long day care with a kindergarten program inside it | After close | Mixed-age rooms and the kinder room's materials |
| Daycare | Weekday hours, often one smaller group | A single evening visit | Meal tables, bathrooms, floors |
| Family day care | In the educator's home, up to seven children at once | Evenings or weekends, around the household | Only the spaces used for care |
| OSHC | Before school, after school and in vacation care | After the afternoon session or before the bell | School rooms handed back ready for class |
Two things stay the same whichever row you sit in. The cleaning follows the NHMRC's approach of detergent first, with disinfectant kept for the higher-risk jobs, and every visit ends with a signed sheet you can hand to an authorised officer. What changes from row to row is the timing, the length of the visit and which rooms carry the heaviest workload. A kinder that shares a hall with a school, for example, needs a different conversation about access than a purpose-built centre with its own keys, and we would rather have that conversation before the first clean than after it.
What does cleaning cover for centres, long day care and kinders?
Centres and kinders share one rule: every room is reset for the next group of children. What changes is the timing. A long day care centre is cleaned after a long, busy day, while a sessional kinder may only need a visit once its last group has gone home.
Integrated early learning centres sit between the two. The long day care rooms get the nightly scope, and the kinder room is handled like a sessional kinder inside the same building, with its materials, easels and shared resources treated as a set so nothing a teacher has laid out for tomorrow gets moved or thrown away.
Childcare centres and long day care
The heaviest scope we run. Babies, toddlers and preschoolers each have their own changing, eating and sleeping routines, so the log is broken down by room and the order matches how your educators open up in the morning. Rooms for under-twos usually carry the most work, because nappy changes, bottles and floor play all happen in one space.
- Nappy change benches and toilets at every visit
- Meal tables, high chairs and bottle prep
- Cot frames and the floor beneath them
- Entry, office and staff room
Kindergartens and early learning centres
Sessional kinders often move two groups through one room each week, and many sit on school or council land with shared toilets and halls. We clean to the session timetable and the term calendar, and agree the shared areas with whoever owns the building. Where a kinder sits inside a school, we fit around the school's lock-up times and alarm arrangements.
- Visits timed after the final session
- Shared toilets and halls scoped in writing
- Outdoor equipment and sandpit checks
- A deep clean pencilled in for each term break
How is daycare and family day care cleaning different?
The scope is smaller and the setting is more personal. A daycare room might be one space in a community building, and family day care runs inside an educator's own home, so we clean only the areas used for care and work around the household.
Family day care has its own limits. Under Regulation 124 of the national regulations, an educator can care for no more than seven children at a time, and no more than four of them can be preschool age or under. The educator's own children count toward those numbers. In a typical home, care happens in a living area, a bathroom and an outdoor space, and those three make up the scope unless the educator asks for more.
That size means a visit is short, often one evening or a Saturday morning, but the standard stays the same. Change mats, the toilet the children use, eating surfaces and mouthed toys are cleaned exactly as they would be in a centre, and the log goes into the educator's own records for the approved provider.
Educators sometimes ask whether a cleaner in their home needs a Working with Children Check once the children have left. Ours hold one either way. More detail on the home-based scope is on our daycare cleaning page.
What does OSHC cleaning involve?
OSHC cleaning is about handing a borrowed room back. Most programs run in school halls, libraries or classrooms, so the space has to be ready for teachers the next morning as well as for the children who arrive after the bell.
We clean once the afternoon session has finished and, where a program also runs a breakfast club, before school starts. Food prep benches and the toilets the program uses are done at every visit, and shared tables and chairs go back into the layout the school expects to find.
Vacation care changes the rhythm. Programs run all day for a fortnight at a time, with craft-heavy days and meals on site, so we move to daily visits for those weeks and step back down when term returns. Programs based in community centres or sports clubs work the same way, with the venue's own booking calendar setting our visit times.
Where the school already has its own cleaners, we agree in writing which rooms are ours and which are theirs. That avoids the two outcomes nobody wants: a room cleaned twice and billed twice, or a room each side assumed the other had done. See OSHC cleaning for how that handover is set up.
When should a term break deep clean be booked?
Book it for the first week of a school holiday break or the Christmas close-down, when rooms can be emptied. Most kinders and OSHC programs follow Victorian school terms, giving four natural windows a year; long day care usually has only the summer shutdown.
School holiday breaks (kinders, OSHC)Christmas close-down (many long day care centres)
A deep clean is not a longer nightly visit. Furniture comes out, carpets are hot-water extracted, walls are washed up to the height children reach, and vents, light fittings and high ledges are dusted. Cushions and soft furnishings are cleaned or sent out, and window tracks and door seals finally get attention.
The weeks before a deep clean matter too. We send a short list of what needs to come off shelves and out of cubbies, so educators can pack artwork and personal items away before they leave for the break and nothing precious ends up in a bag by mistake. Book early, because every centre wants the same fortnight. Give us your close-down dates when you accept the regular quote and the deep clean is reserved then. A sample scope is on the term break deep cleaning page.
What happens after an outbreak or a bodily fluid spill?
An outbreak gets a planned disinfection of every room the sick children used, done once the Department of Health has been told. A single spill during the day is handled by your educators with a spill kit, and we treat that area properly at the next clean.
Outbreak cleaning follows the same order every time: toilets and change areas first, eating surfaces next, then everything else within a child's reach, with fresh cloths for each room. Hand, foot and mouth disease and flu travel on hands and shared toys more than on floors, so for those we widen the clean to every toy shelf and hard play surface in the affected rooms. The product depends on the illness, and gastro calls for a chlorine-based disinfectant, so we ask what the health unit has advised before the team arrives.
After the clean, soft toys and dress-ups from affected rooms are bagged for your laundry rather than wiped, because fabric cannot be disinfected on the spot. Write any daytime spill on the sign-in sheet and it becomes its own line on that night's log, with the area, the product and the time. Our outbreak and infection control cleaning page covers flu, gastro and hand, foot and mouth.
The daytime routine, based on the NHMRC's Staying Healthy guidance.
- 1Gloves on, room cleared
Move children away from the area before anything else.
- 2Soak it up
Absorb the spill with paper towel and put it straight into a bag.
- 3Detergent first
Wash the surface with detergent and warm water.
- 4Then disinfect
Apply disinfectant to the cleaned surface and let it dry.
- 5Bag, seal, wash
Gloves into the bag, the bag sealed, hands washed well.
- Disposable gloves
- Paper towel
- Sealable bags
- Detergent
- Disinfectant
- Disposable apron
What is included whichever service you choose?
Six things come with every service on this page at no extra cost: the signed log, a checked and consistent team, a product register with safety data sheets, a fixed written price, a report of anything broken, and a named contact who answers for the account.
- Signed log
Itemised by room and surface, signed before the team locks up, with our copy kept for twelve months.
- Consistent, checked team
The same cleaners on your site, each carrying a current WWCC card and a cleared police check.
- Product register
Every product we bring on site listed with its safety data sheet, updated whenever a product changes.
- Fixed written price
One figure per visit or per job, GST on its own line, and no charge for travel inside the metro area.
- Faults reported
Leaking taps, cracked dispensers, loose fittings and sandpit hazards written up for the director that night.
- One named contact
A single person who knows your site, handles changes to the scope and answers when something needs fixing.
Anything outside those six, such as a one-off clean before a council inspection or an extra visit after a family evening, is quoted as a separate line so it never blurs into the regular visit price.
How do you get a fixed-price quote for any of these services?
Send the facility type, your licensed places and the nights you want covered. One written price for the whole site comes back within 24 hours, including any deep clean or outbreak cover you add, with GST shown separately.
Starting prices for each service, and the factors that move a quote, are set out on our childcare cleaning prices page. If you are comparing us with the cleaner you already have, send their current scope as well and we will quote against the same rooms and nights, so the two prices can be compared fairly.
- 1Tell us the siteFacility type, places, rooms and the nights you need.
- 2Walk the rooms togetherOptional, but it settles the order of the log before day one.
- 3Approve and startSign the written quote and choose a start date.
What else do providers ask about our services?
Short answers to the questions we hear most while a provider is choosing between services. Pricing questions are covered on the prices page linked in the quote section above.
01Which service fits my centre?
02Can you combine daily and deep cleaning?
03Do you clean on weekends?
One quote can cover every service on this page.
Tell us what you run and we will price all of it in writing.