School cleaning in Sheffield that turns up vetted.
We clean 21 schools every school day. Specialist cleaning for primaries, secondaries, special schools and academy trusts — with enhanced DBS checks on every operative, a relief team that exists purely to cover absence, and the written confirmation your single central record needs, sent before we start. Caretaking and kitchen staff available on the same contract.
No school has ever switched cleaners because the floors looked dull.
They switch because on a wet Thursday in November nobody arrived, the site manager cleaned three classrooms himself, and the person who eventually turned up on the Friday was somebody nobody had a check for. Three things in how we are built exist to stop both halves of that — and none of them are promises, they are costs we carry.
A relief team with no school of its own
Most contractors cover absence by asking somebody to do two sites, or by sending whoever is free. We employ relief cleaners whose only job is to fill gaps — and they hold the same enhanced DBS as the permanent team, because a cover cleaner who cannot be vetted is not cover. It costs us money in the weeks nobody is off. That is rather the point.
Checked before the first shift, not after it
Enhanced DBS is completed and seen before anybody joins your site team. Where staff transfer to us under TUPE, we verify status before they work unsupervised. You get written confirmation for your single central record at mobilisation, and an updated list every time the team on your site changes.
Hours you can check, not hours we claim
Cleaners check in and out on site with GPS-verified timestamps. It means you are invoiced for hours actually worked, and it means "were they here on the 12th" has an answer rather than an argument — which matters more in a school than anywhere else we work.
Your single central record should never be a chase.
Keeping Children Safe in Education 2026 applies from 1 September 2026. For contractors it sets the level of check by what the person actually does on your site, and it expects the school to hold written confirmation from the supplier that those checks have been carried out. Here is exactly how we map onto that, so your office is not emailing us in September asking for certificate numbers.
Every operative who works in one of our schools holds an enhanced DBS, completed and seen before their first shift. It is not the cheapest way to run a school contract. It is the only way to run one where cover is real, because a relief cleaner you cannot legally put in a classroom is not relief at all.
Our safeguarding policy, safer recruitment and compliance framework, insurance certificates and site-specific risk assessments and method statements all come with the proposal — not three weeks after you ask. If your trust has its own vetting schedule or contractor induction, we work to yours rather than ours.
Inspectors ask for the single central record and safeguarding records by 8am on the first day. Our part of it is a folder in your office rather than an email we owe you: confirmations on file, kept current when the team changes, and re-issued the same day if you need a fresh copy. We will not pretend Ofsted grades your cleaning — it does not. It does look at whether your safeguarding paperwork is straight, and contractor records are part of that.
Safeguarding training for our school teams runs through Tes Safeguarding Training — the same online platform thousands of schools and trusts use for their own staff, with courses built around Keeping Children Safe in Education and a reporting suite that evidences completion. Every operative who works in a school completes it.
It is retaken annually, and again whenever KCSIE changes. Which it does most Septembers — so the team cleaning your school in the autumn term has been trained against the version of the guidance you are actually working to, not the one that was current when they joined.
Training records for your site come in the same pack as the DBS confirmations, so the evidence is in one place rather than two. Where your school or trust runs its own contractor induction or safeguarding module, our staff complete yours as well as ours.
Courses delivered through Tes Safeguarding Training — over 80 online safeguarding, health and safety and wellbeing courses, developed with Childnet, Kidscape, YoungMinds, Brook and Winston’s Wish.
A school is twelve different cleaning jobs on one contract.
A science prep room, an early years carpet and a boys' toilet block at half past three do not respond to the same method, the same cloth or the same frequency. Your specification is written area by area, with frequencies against each task, so nothing lives in the gap between "daily" and "as required".
Classrooms & learning spaces
Desks, touch points, floors and low-level dusting, worked around displays, trays and whatever has been left out for the morning.
Toilets & washrooms
The rooms your parents judge the school on. Colour-coded equipment, cleaned to a set frequency and checked on audits rather than on complaints.
Corridors, halls & circulation
High-traffic floors kept to a maintenance regime with periodic buffing and stripping scheduled into the holidays instead of squeezed into a Tuesday.
Early years & nursery
Floor-level cleaning, resource and equipment wipe-downs, and products chosen for rooms where everything ends up in somebody's mouth.
Kitchens & dining halls
Dining hall turnaround between sittings and the front-of-house side of the kitchen, cleaning up to the line your catering team sets, and no further into the food preparation areas they control.
Sports halls & changing rooms
Showers, benches, floors and the drains nobody else volunteers for — the hardest rooms on any school site to hold to standard.
Science labs & specialist rooms
Labs, DT and art rooms cleaned to a method agreed with your technician, with clear lines about what we do and do not touch.
Libraries & IT suites
Screens, keyboards and shared devices cleaned with the right products rather than the nearest ones, on a frequency that suits the timetable.
Staff rooms & offices
Reception, admin, staff room and the head's office, worked to the same specification as everywhere else rather than whenever there is time.
Entrances & external areas
Main entrance, matting, glass and the approach a visiting inspector or prospective parent walks through first.
Medical rooms & welfare
Cleaned to a documented method with the right disposal arrangements, including after a spill or an incident.
Bins, waste & consumables
Waste streams, hygiene units and the hand towels somebody in your office is currently ordering. All of it can sit on the cleaning invoice.
Periodic work — carpets, hard floor stripping, high-level dusting, external glass — is scheduled into the holidays and priced in the contract rather than quoted each time. See all twelve specialist services →
The contract runs on your calendar, not ours.
School cleaning is the only sector we work in where the building empties on a known date. That is an opportunity, not an inconvenience — the heavy work belongs in the gaps, which is exactly when most contractors reduce their hours and hope nobody notices.
Term time
Daily cleaning to the agreed specification, after school or early morning depending on the site. Wraparound, clubs and lettings worked around rather than cleaned through.
Half terms
The rooms that cannot be done properly with children in them — changing rooms, dining halls, hard floors in the worst corridors. Booked in at the start of the year, not negotiated in October.
Christmas & Easter
Periodic tasks on a rolling programme: carpets, high-level dusting, internal glass, kitchen deep cleans where we hold that scope, and the corridors the autumn term has taken the finish off.
Summer reset
The full deep clean, phased around your site works and refurbishments so the decorators and the floor machines are not in the same room on the same day. The building is handed back ready for September, not ready for the second week of it.
INSET days and exam season. A staff training day is a full day in an empty building and the cheapest deep clean you will ever get; exam halls need a different regime and a quieter one. Both go into the schedule at the start of the year, so the year is planned once rather than renegotiated eight times.
Most schools start with the cleaning. Some of them stop there, and that is fine.
Cleaning is what we are for and it is the majority of what we do in schools. But the same recruitment, the same enhanced DBS, the same relief cover and the same supervision put a caretaker or a kitchen assistant on your site as easily as a cleaner — under one contract, one point of contact and one invoice, instead of three agencies and a rota you are managing yourself.
School cleaning
A daily contract clean written area by area, staffed by the same people every day, supervised in person and evidenced in writing.
The specification is built at the site visit and it is yours — task by task, area by area, with a frequency against each one. No "as required", because "as required" is where a contract quietly shrinks over three years until somebody notices the library has not been vacuumed since Year 6 left.
Your team is recruited for your school and stays with it. Mobile supervisors audit against the specification in person rather than by phone, and you get the audit report whether it was a good one or not. Where standards slip, it is our supervisor who finds it first — that is the entire job.
Consumables, washroom units, waste and external glass can sit on the same schedule and the same invoice, or you can keep your existing suppliers. Plenty of our school contracts are cleaning and nothing else.
Arrange a site visit →Caretaking & site support
Assistant caretakers and site staff, employed by us, covering a vacancy, a long-term absence or a permanent second pair of hands.
Caretaking is the role a school feels fastest when it is empty. Opening up, locking down, the alarm at ten past six, the fire alarm test on a Tuesday, the reactive jobs that arrive by radio, the setting out for a parents' evening and the gritting at seven in the morning in January. When the post is vacant, all of it lands on somebody who already has a job.
Our site staff work to a written schedule agreed with you, and we keep the compliance side deliberately clear. Statutory duties that sit with the school or trust stay with you — we do not pretend a contractor can take the dutyholder's responsibility for asbestos or water safety off a governing body. What we do is carry out the routine checks and recording you delegate, to the standard the guidance sets, and hand you the records.
Before any work that could disturb the fabric of the building, we ask to see the asbestos register. It is a short conversation that a surprising number of contractors never have.
Talk to us about site staff →Kitchen & catering staff
Kitchen assistants, servers and pot wash, supplied and employed by us, into your kitchen and under your catering lead.
From September 2026 free school meals extend to every child in a household on Universal Credit. More covers, the same forty minutes, the same servery — and a kitchen that was fully staffed in June is not necessarily fully staffed in September. This is the part of a school where a single absence is visible to six hundred people within an hour.
We do not take over your catering. Your cook or catering provider runs the kitchen, sets the menu and holds the food safety management system; we put reliable, checked, trained people into it and cover them when they are off. Where you run in-house catering and have simply run out of hands, that is the arrangement that works best.
On training we are precise, because a lot of suppliers are not: the law requires food handlers to be trained and supervised commensurate with their work, and Level 2 Food Safety and Hygiene for Catering is the standard way to evidence it. Our kitchen staff hold it. Allergy awareness training is refreshed at least annually, in line with the DfE's statutory guidance on allergy safety in schools, which expects all staff present when pupils are on site — catering staff named explicitly — to hold it.
Talk to us about kitchen staff →Caretaking and kitchen staffing sit under NowThen People — the same recruitment, vetting, training, HR and absence cover that puts our cleaning teams into schools, used for the other roles a school site runs on. Nothing here is compulsory, and adding it later does not mean reopening the cleaning contract.
One specification, several sites, and a report your board can read.
A trust does not have a cleaning problem, it has a consistency problem: eleven academies, four inherited contracts, three different standards and no way to compare them. What a head of estates needs is the same specification applied site by site, with numbers that stack.
One specification, priced per site
The same task and frequency standard across the trust, with hours and price built from each building rather than averaged across them. A small primary does not subsidise the secondary.
Phased mobilisation
Sites brought over in waves against a plan you agree, usually aligned to contract end dates and holidays, so the trust is never mobilising eleven academies in one August.
Multiple TUPE populations
Different incumbents, different terms, different transfer dates. Handled in-house, in parallel, with a single point of contact for your HR team rather than four.
Reporting that compares
Audit scores, attendance and hours delivered per academy in one report, so an underperforming site is visible to you before it is visible to a headteacher.
Invoicing your finance team can reconcile
Consolidated at trust level or split per academy against each cost centre — whichever way your finance director wants it, agreed before the first invoice rather than after the third.
One escalation route
A named contact for the trust and a named supervisor per site. Heads deal with the site; you deal with us; nobody is copied into fourteen email threads.
Vetting evidence per academy
Each school's SCR confirmations and training records issued separately and kept current, because the record sits with the school even when the contract sits with the trust.
Documentation up front
Insurance, policies, RAMS, method statements and references supplied with the proposal so your procurement pack is complete before the evaluation panel meets.
Most single-school cleaning contracts fall into DfE's over £40,000 buying band — competitive quotes or a tender — and often below the £207,720 including VAT Procurement Act threshold that applies to sub-central authorities from 1 January 2026. Watch the arithmetic though: value is counted across the whole term including extensions, so a three or five year contract crosses that line more often than schools expect, and a trust-wide contract almost always does. It changes the process rather than the answer.
The Academy Trust Handbook also requires trusts to consider DfE-approved deals when buying and to record that decision. We are happy to be evaluated alongside a framework, and we will give you the documentation to evidence the comparison either way. If you would rather run this through a framework you already use, tell us which one at the site visit.
Changing contractor mid-year is not the risk people think it is.
It is a risk when it is rushed. Give us the date your current contract ends and we work backwards from it — because the one part of this that cannot be compressed is TUPE, and that is the part most schools discover late.
Site visit
We walk the school with you — every area, the hours, the standard you are working to, the rooms your current contractor never gets right and the ones nobody has looked at properly in two years.
Written proposal
Specification, frequencies, hours and price, with insurance, policies, safeguarding framework and RAMS in the same pack. Everything an evaluation panel or a governing body needs, in one document.
TUPE and mobilisation
Your existing cleaners usually transfer to us. We handle consultation, contracts and payroll in-house, verify DBS status for everyone transferring, and set up access, keyholding and consumables against a firm start date.
First clean and first audit
No gap between the last clean under your old contract and the first under ours. A supervisor is on site in the first week, and the first written audit lands inside the first month.
Under TUPE, the outgoing employer must provide employee liability information to the incoming one at least 28 days before the transfer — names, terms, disciplinary and grievance history, and any live claims. Consultation with the affected staff has to happen properly on top of that, and there is no fixed statutory period for it.
In practice that means a comfortable school mobilisation starts well before the month it happens in. If your contract ends on 31 August, the conversation belongs in the summer term, not in the last week of July. If you are already inside that window, tell us — it is usually still workable, it just becomes a plan rather than a process.
References, not marketing copy.
Three of the schools and trusts we clean for were asked to write a reference. These are their words, lightly trimmed for length and otherwise untouched.
We have worked with several cleaning companies since 2008 and Now Then are by far the best company we have worked with.Sheffield primary school · client since the pandemic
“Now Then Cleaners have held our cleaning contract since 1st August 2018. The company is a professionally run company who meet timescales and quality inspections. They adhere to all safeguarding and security regulations that are required in schools. I would not hesitate to recommend Hugo and team.”
Cleaning contract since August 2018
“When we needed a new cleaning company we were in a situation where we had to act fast. Now Then Cleaners provided everything we needed with such short notice. This wasn’t easy. But they made it look easy. Transferring from the old cleaning company was made as stress free for me as possible, and if I had any questions then Hugo went out of his way to make sure I understood everything I needed to, even if it related to complex pension transfers.”
On the handover
“We appointed NowThen Cleaners in the Autumn term of 2019 to provide permanent cleaning staff to two of our schools within our Multi-Academy Trust. Since then NowThen Cleaners have grown their coverage within the Trust and continued to provide reliable and quality services across all schools. NowThen excelled during the pandemic… Since then they have gone from strength to strength providing full wrap around services across the whole trust.”
Two schools in 2019, now trust-wide
“Hugo also is proactive in supporting the school to save money. After only a few weeks he identified where we, as a school, could save money. I felt that not only is the company honest, but they have strong morals too. Other companies wouldn’t have behaved like that.”
The standards, the communication and the transfer all matter. But a cleaning contractor telling a school where it is overspending is the part that tends to decide whether the relationship lasts. Our longest-running school contract has run since August 2018.
Cover only works if there is something to cover from.
A two-van cleaning firm cannot run a relief team, and a national operator will not put a supervisor on your site at half past six. Twenty-one schools is the scale that lets us do both — big enough to carry relief staff, small enough that your site has a name rather than a number.
We pay at or above the Real Living Wage on the majority of our sites, every operative holds an enhanced DBS before their first shift, and every new starter is trained and inducted before it. None of that is charity. It is why the same faces come back to your school in September — and turnover is what actually degrades a cleaning standard, so it is the number we manage hardest.
Directly employed teams, full-time mobile supervisors and a relief crew whose only job is cover. More about how we are set up →
Sheffield first, and as far as we can staff a school properly.
A school contract is staffed around one building with its own team, so distance is a recruitment question rather than a travel one. If we cannot recruit a reliable team within sensible travel of your site, we will tell you that instead of taking the contract and hoping.
South Yorkshire
- Sheffield
- Rotherham
- Barnsley
- Doncaster
Derbyshire
- Chesterfield
- Dronfield
- Derby
- Buxton
West Yorkshire
- Leeds
- Wakefield
- Huddersfield
- Bradford
Nottinghamshire
- Worksop
- Mansfield
- Nottingham
Across Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Greater Manchester, Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire — 25 towns and cities in total. See every location we work in →
The questions school business managers actually ask.
Q.01What DBS checks do your school cleaners have?
Every operative who works in one of our schools holds an enhanced DBS, completed and seen before their first shift. Anyone in regulated activity is checked against the children's barred list.
Keeping Children Safe in Education 2026, which applies from 1 September 2026, sets the level of check by what a contractor actually does on site and expects the school to hold written confirmation from the supplier that the checks have been carried out. You get that confirmation at mobilisation — name, certificate number and issue date for each person on your site — and an updated version whenever the team changes.
Our staff carry photo ID so you can check identity on arrival, which the guidance also expects. Safeguarding training runs through Tes Safeguarding Training, the same platform many schools use for their own staff. It is retaken annually and again whenever KCSIE is updated, so the team on your site in the autumn term has been trained against the current version. Training records come in the same pack as the DBS confirmations.
Q.02What happens when a cleaner is off sick in the middle of term?
Relief staff cover it. We employ relief cleaners who hold no school of their own, precisely so absence does not become your problem, and they hold the same enhanced DBS as the permanent team — which is what makes them usable in a school at short notice.
It is the most expensive decision in how this business is structured. It is also the reason "the cleaners did not turn up" comes up in almost every first conversation we have with a school.
Q.03How much does school cleaning cost?
It comes from the building: the areas, the hours those areas genuinely need, the standard you are working to and how often each task has to happen. That is why it starts with a site visit rather than a form.
Anyone quoting a school from a rate card without walking it is estimating your hours, and the correction arrives later as a variation — or as a standard that quietly drops to fit the price. You get a written specification with the price, so you can see exactly what you are buying and hold us to it.
Q.04Do you clean during the school holidays?
Yes, and it is where the real work happens. Periodic tasks are scheduled into half terms and holidays on a rolling programme, with the full deep clean in the summer, phased around any site works so the decorators and the floor machines are not in the same room on the same day.
All of it is priced into the contract at the start of the year rather than quoted each time, so it does not become a conversation about budget every August.
Q.05We already have a contractor. How does TUPE work?
Where there are existing cleaning staff, they usually transfer to us under TUPE on their existing terms, with continuity of employment. We handle the consultation, contracts and payroll in-house — we are not outsourcing your staff transfer to an HR consultancy.
The date to watch is the employee liability information: the outgoing employer must provide it at least 28 days before the transfer. Consultation has to happen properly on top of that. So if your contract ends on 31 August, the conversation belongs in the summer term.
We also verify DBS status for everyone transferring in, which is frequently where a school discovers what it had actually been sold.
Q.06Can you supply caretaking or site staff as well?
Yes — assistant caretakers and site staff, employed by us, covering a vacancy, a long-term absence or a permanent extra pair of hands. Opening and locking up, the weekly fire alarm test, legionella flushing and temperature records, fire door checks, minor repairs, room set-ups, gritting and contractor sign-in.
To be clear about where the line sits: statutory duties that belong to the school or trust as dutyholder — asbestos management, water safety, fire risk assessment — stay with you. We carry out the routine checks and recording you delegate, to the standard the guidance sets, and give you the records.
Q.07Can you supply kitchen and catering assistants?
Yes — kitchen assistants, servery staff and pot wash, into your kitchen and under your catering lead. We do not take over catering, set menus or hold your food safety management system; your cook or catering provider does that.
Every member of kitchen staff holds an enhanced DBS and Level 2 Food Safety and Hygiene for Catering, and refreshes allergy awareness training at least annually — which the DfE's statutory guidance on allergy safety in schools expects of all staff present when pupils are on site, catering staff named explicitly.
The pressure point this year is September. Free school meals now extend to every child in a household on Universal Credit, so covers are up in a lot of kitchens that were already fully committed.
Q.08Are your cleaning products safe to use around children?
We use low-hazard, pH-neutral products for routine work and keep anything stronger for periodic tasks in an empty building. COSHH data sheets for everything we bring on site come with the proposal and stay in the cupboard on site.
Equipment is colour-coded so washroom, kitchen and classroom cloths never cross. Chemicals are stored in a locked cupboard in a location agreed with you, and are never left in a corridor, a cupboard a child can reach, or on a trolley at the end of a shift.
Q.09We are a multi-academy trust with sites across the region. Can you cover all of them?
Yes, with one specification applied site by site and priced from each building rather than averaged. Mobilisation is phased against contract end dates so you are never moving every academy in one August, and multiple TUPE populations are handled in parallel with a single contact for your HR team.
Reporting comes to you consolidated — audit scores, hours delivered and attendance per academy — and invoicing can be consolidated at trust level or split per academy against each cost centre. SCR confirmations are issued to each school separately, because the record sits with the school even when the contract sits with the trust.
Q.10Do we have to tender, or can we appoint you directly?
That depends on the value and on your own scheme of delegation. Most single-school cleaning contracts sit in DfE's over-£40,000 buying band — competitive quotes or a tender — and often below the £207,720 including VAT Procurement Act threshold that applies to sub-central authorities from 1 January 2026. The catch is that value is counted across the whole term including extensions, so a three or five year contract crosses that line more often than schools expect, and trust-wide contracts almost always do.
Academy trusts also have to consider DfE-approved deals when buying and record that decision, so if you go off-framework your file needs to show why. We would rather help you evidence that than pretend it does not apply — the documentation comes with our proposal either way.
One nuance worth raising early: from September 2026 trusts are expected to use the DfE-approved supply framework for agency supply staff unless they hold an alternative compliant agreement. Our caretaking and kitchen staff are not agency supply — they are employed by us and provided under a service contract, with supervision, relief cover and vetting built in — so that arrangement sits outside the mandate. If your procurement team wants that set out in writing, it comes with the proposal.
Q.11What kinds of school do you work with?
Primary schools, infant and junior schools, secondaries, special schools and academies — both single-school contracts and multi-academy trusts. Local authority maintained schools, academies, free schools and independent schools all work the same way from our side; what changes is the premises standard you are held to and who signs the contract.
We clean 21 schools every school day. Most of that work is across Sheffield, Rotherham, Barnsley and Doncaster, with sites in Derbyshire, West Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire — our longest-running school contract has run since August 2018, and our first multi-academy trust appointed us in 2019.
Something not covered? Email hello@nowthencleaners.co.uk or call 0114 212 7030.
Specialist school cleaning contractors, based in Sheffield since 2015.
NowThen Cleaners cleans 21 schools every school day. We provide contract cleaning to primary schools, junior and infant schools, secondary schools, special schools and academy trusts across Sheffield, Rotherham, Barnsley and Doncaster, with sites in Chesterfield, Dronfield, Worksop, Leeds and Wakefield. We are a Sheffield company — our office is in the city, our supervisors are out on sites every day, and when something needs sorting you speak to somebody local who knows your school.
School cleaning is not office cleaning with children in the building. It carries a safeguarding requirement that most commercial contracts do not, a calendar that empties four times a year, rooms that no office has, and a level of scrutiny — from parents, from governors, from a trust board — that means a bad week is noticed by several hundred people. That is why we treat it as its own service line rather than an extension of the commercial round, with enhanced DBS checks on every operative, a relief team that can legally step into a classroom, and written evidence supplied for your single central record before the first shift.
Alongside the cleaning contract we supply caretaking and site staff and kitchen and catering assistants through NowThen People — employed by us, checked to the same standard, covered when they are off. For a school running short of hands in the kitchen after the September free school meals expansion, or carrying a vacant caretaker post into the autumn term, it is usually faster and cheaper than recruiting twice.
If you are reviewing your cleaning contract, tendering for the next academic year, or simply tired of chasing a contractor for paperwork, the honest first step is half an hour walking the building. Arrange a site visit, or call 0114 212 7030. We also clean offices, public sector buildings and nine other sectors across five counties.
Half an hour walking your school beats an hour on the phone.
Show us round, tell us what has gone wrong before, and you will get a written specification, a price, and the compliance pack your governors or trust board will ask for — before they ask for it.
Sheffield · Rotherham · Barnsley · Doncaster · 0114 212 7030