Cleaning, food safety, and outbreak plans that hold up

A cleaning schedule needs to name the area or item, how often it's cleaned, the method, the product, who's responsible, and what happens when something's missed — covering toilets, nappy areas, food areas, high-touch surfaces, outdoor equipment, and waste, not just the rooms that are obviously visible. Mouthed toys need their own version of the same discipline: removed, cleaned, and disinfected per the service's actual infection-control procedure, not "eventually."

Infection control more broadly covers hand and respiratory hygiene, nappy-changing and toileting controls, food hygiene, exclusion from care when a child or staff member is genuinely ill, cross-contamination prevention, and — when it's needed — outbreak management with reporting of notifiable diseases. An outbreak plan specifically needs a responsible person, a parent-communication plan, exclusion arrangements, enhanced cleaning, contact with public health where relevant, and a return-to-service process, not just "we'll figure it out if it happens."

Food management and the healthy-eating policy need to describe the same menu the crèche is actually serving — safe storage and preparation, allergen control, supervision while eating, and menus that genuinely accommodate age, developmental, cultural, religious, and medical needs, not a policy written in the abstract and a kitchen running independently of it.

Bloomffy's facility checks cover the recurring operational half of this — cleaning, fridge and food temperatures, allergen re-checks — as one flexible check type rather than seven separate tables, logged from the room device where the check actually happens. The menu and allergy side runs through the weekly menu cross-checked against each child's recorded allergens (which carry a severity, not just a yes/no flag) — and that cross-check has to re-run on any serving-time substitution, not just at planning time, because a swapped ingredient at the point of serving is exactly the moment a missed allergen actually matters. Dietary preference — vegetarian, religious, texture — is kept as a genuinely separate record from allergy safety data, on purpose, since conflating "prefers not to eat" with "cannot safely eat" is the kind of shortcut that only looks harmless until it isn't.