Seton College
Seton College is a coeducational Catholic high school located just south of Fremantle with over 1,000 secondary students and approximately 250 staff.
The College approached us in August 2018 as they were looking for a new cleaning partner, having had a disappointing experience working with their existing provider.
Problems faced
The main problem they had was that while the relationship had started out on good terms, cleaning staff had soon become complacent, and small but important tasks were being missed on a regular basis.
"We had a long-standing contract with another cleaning contractor. It was never exceptional. Over the last few years of the contract standards were starting to noticeably slip"
Staff at the College found themselves reporting issues such as laboratory sinks not being cleaned, areas such as stairwells and locker rooms being overlooked, drinking fountains not being properly sanitised, and floors left dirty in places, especially the corners of rooms.
The school found it difficult to contact their account manager, and when they were able to successfully raise these issues their complaints would often go unheeded, with the same problems occurring during the next clean.
Seton College were looking for a company to take initiative and address these aspects of cleaning without having to be asked, as well as being available for comments or requests and acting upon them swiftly.
"They go out of their way to familiarise themselves with the School calendar making sure we are at our best for all significant events"
Our solutions
To make this process as easy as possible for the already busy staff at the College, we assigned them a dedicated supervisor, who would act as a single point of contact, and also an advocate, performing inspections and reviews of our staff on their behalf.
We also implemented an online portal so that any requests from the College could be logged quickly via a smartphone and tracked to completion or resolution.
"They communicate regularly with our managers to ensure all the finer details in terms of presentation are carried out. The standard of work cannot be faulted."
As always, our cleaning team was incentivised and fully trained to take a proactive approach to their work at Seton College — ‘doing the little things’ and received positive feedback from staff for additional services such as:
- Extra cleaning before school visits, events, end of Term mass
- Reporting property maintenance issues, vandalism, graffiti
- Liaising with HSS (Seton’s security company)
- Collecting lost property
- Replacing classroom floor mats
- Installing air freshener sprays in bathrooms
"From day one, the cleaners on site have acted professionally and courteously, and regularly report items outside their scope of work such as maintenance items, security or vandalism."
Within the first term, complaints from staff related to cleaning dropped to zero, and in their place, we received compliments for the general tidiness and cleanliness of the premises, praise for our introduction of a new centralised lost property system, and engagement with the new reporting system to alert us to isolated incidents or graffiti, damage or littering.
View our School Cleaning Service.
"I have been working in private schools in Western Australia continuously since 1994. During this time I have employed close to 10 cleaning contractors. Intrepid are by far the best, and it is a significant gap to second best."
