Schools and childcare

Schools and childcare settings have one rule that outranks everything else: nothing may be applied where children can reach it, and nothing may be left behind. That shapes every decision, including the ones about timing.

The pests we see most are ants, cockroaches, rodents and mosquitoes, and each has a schools specific angle. Ants and cockroaches follow food, which in a school means the canteen, the food preparation areas, and the places where crumbs actually accumulate, which is rarely where anyone expects. Rodents follow the same food and get in through gaps at ground level and into roof spaces. Mosquitoes are a serious concern rather than a nuisance, because playgrounds, planted areas, water tanks and blocked drainage produce them in quantity and children are outside in them.

We work almost entirely outside teaching hours. Weekends, holidays and evenings are normal for this sector and we plan around the school calendar rather than around ours. That is not a courtesy, it is the condition that makes the work possible: a treatment that needs an area kept clear cannot be done with a class in it.

Treatments are chosen so that nothing is accessible afterwards. Bait goes into tamper resistant stations or into voids, gel goes inside equipment and cavities rather than onto surfaces, and treated areas are ready for normal use once the application has dried. Where we cannot guarantee that in a particular space, we use a physical or monitoring approach instead rather than compromising.

Mosquito work in a school is mostly not a treatment at all. It is finding and removing what holds water on the site, and we would rather spend the visit doing that and be honest that it is the part that works.

We provide a record of each visit and are specific about anything that needs the school to act, because a blocked gutter or a propped door will keep producing the same problem however often we come.

Single schools, preschools and daycare settings are work we take on directly.

Term time and the holidays are effectively two different jobs. The long breaks are when the useful structural work happens: proofing gaps, dealing with roof space access, clearing what holds water, and treating areas that cannot be touched with children on site. Term time is monitoring and response. Planning the year that way costs nothing and gets far more done than trying to fit everything around a timetable.

Kitchens and canteens are treated as commercial kitchens, because that is what they are, with gel into equipment voids rather than spray across surfaces. Boarding accommodation, where a school has it, is treated as guest accommodation, which means bed bugs are a real possibility and are dealt with room by room including the rooms either side.

We will also walk staff through what to look for if that is useful. A caretaker who knows what a rodent run looks like along a wall finds a problem weeks before we would on a scheduled visit.