COSHH in a nursery is mostly about the cleaning cupboard

Walk into most nurseries at half past twelve and you’ll find someone spraying tables, someone else wiping the lunch trolley, and a mop bucket parked by the kitchen door. The scene is so ordinary that we stop seeing it. Yet almost everything in it, the spray, the disinfectant, the fluid in the bucket, falls under COSHH.

October tends to sharpen the picture. The sniffles arrive with the autumn term, the wipe-downs get more frequent, and the cupboard under the sink empties faster than it did in July. Which makes this a good moment for a quiet question: does everyone on your team actually know what they’re handling?

Hazardous substances hide in plain sight

COSHH stands for the Control of Substances Hazardous to Health, and the name does it no favours. It sounds like a concern for factories and laboratories, not for a setting where the most intimidating machine is the laminator.

In truth, a nursery holds more hazardous substances than plenty of workplaces. Cleaning products and disinfectants are the obvious ones. Some craft materials can qualify too, which surprises people, as can products living quietly in the staff kitchen or the outdoor shed.

Here’s the part that matters most: COSHH is not only about the person holding the bottle. A substance can affect anyone nearby. The practitioner setting up the next activity while the tables dry. The apprentice who decants cleaner into an unlabelled spray bottle because the original ran out. The children crawling across a freshly mopped floor. Exposure doesn’t check your job title first.

The assessment is where good intentions wobble

Most settings have a COSHH file somewhere. Fewer can say, hand on heart, that it matches what’s actually in the cupboard this term. Products change when suppliers change. Someone brings in a heavy-duty degreaser for one stubborn job and it quietly becomes a permanent resident. The data sheets in the folder describe things you stopped buying two years ago.

A proper COSHH assessment follows a simple logic. Identify what you’ve got. Understand the risk it carries. Then work through the hierarchy of control, starting with the questions that remove risk rather than manage it. Could a gentler product do the same job? Could the process change, so cleaning happens when children aren’t in the room? Personal protective equipment sits at the bottom of that hierarchy for a reason. Gloves are the backstop, not the plan.

We hear a familiar story from managers a lot: the COSHH file was built years ago by somebody who has since left, and nobody quite owns it now. If that rings true, the fix is less painful than you might expect. Our COSHH (Level 2) course shows staff how to carry out an assessment and produce an action plan, so the file stops being a mystery document and becomes something the team actually uses.

Make it a whole-team habit

Because exposure isn’t limited to whoever does the Friday deep clean, COSHH awareness belongs in induction for everyone, not just in the cleaner’s job description. A new starter should know why the spray lives on the high shelf, what the symbols on a label mean, and who to tell when something runs out, all before their first solo tidy-up.

Bank and agency staff deserve a thought here too. They arrive mid-shift, they muck in, and they’ll reach for whatever bottle is nearest. A two-minute walkthrough of where products live and how they’re used is a small habit with a long reach.

Training seals it. When the whole team can identify risks and knows the control measures in place, safe practice stops depending on one careful person being on shift. And a certificated record of that training gives you clean evidence for compliance and audit, filed and forgettable in the best way.

Then, next time the lunch tables get their midday spray, you’ll know the routine is exactly as safe as it looks.