ECJ EUROPEAN Cleaning Journal

Is it fair that children should clean up their own mess while at school? Danish children don’t seem to mind. Lotte Printz reports from Denmark.

Five minutes before the final bell, pupils at Pedersborg School in the little Danish town of Sorø get ready to go home. But five children in each class stay on. They turn on some music and find some floor and table swiffers and start cleaning their classroom. Before they go home, they also take out the bins and sweep the floor in the corridor outside the classroom.

The five pupils are the class’ so-called environmental team and carry out those tasks a month at the time. This nudging scheme developed by a local advertising agency also includes communication between the pupils and the cleaner responsible for the actual cleaning of the classrooms and other school areas. On the wall there’s a picture of the cleaner and a message board, where he or she can ‘send’ messages to pupils about a job well done – or not so well done.

Simple? Perhaps. But both children and their parents give the scheme the thumbs up, the cleaners are pleased too and can spend the eight minutes allocated for classroom cleaning more wisely. And the idea won the advertising agency a cleaning award last autumn for their contribution to the industry.

Not least considering that the time saved by the cleaning staff in the classrooms can now be allocated to school toilets constantly being criticised for being too filthy to be fit for humans, and thus for making pupils ignore nature’s call. In Sorø the school toilets are now cleaned twice a day and the kids can even call the cleaners if they think the loos need another good sweeping.

At another Danish school, they introduced other measures to combat grim toilets. Pupils were assigned to ‘run over’ the washrooms during lunch breaks – attended by a grown-up – and wipe bogeys off the walls. An increasing problem apparently along with other bad bathroom behaviour.

Mum does mind

But one mum was not overly thrilled by this arrangement. “That’s the cleaning staff’s job. The children must have their break before classes begin again. Cleaning is not part of their curriculum,” the mum argued.

Had she hoped for some backing when the story hit the Danish news, she ended up disappointed. The children asked at the school didn’t mind and her opinion found little support in the Facebook storm that followed.

“This is a true example of Danish ‘curling mums’ at their worst,” one user wrote using the commonly used Danish term for parents who “sweep the ice” for their children (helicopter parenting). Others pointed out that this could teach the children more respect for school property or that there wouldn’t have been any problems if parents had taught their kids proper hygiene in the first place.

Another popular argument was that children go to school to learn – and that cleaning and tidying up might as well be part of the curriculum of life.