Authorities are warning that there is no cheap fix for asbestos contamination across New South Wales schools.

There are reports that several schools have tried multiple times to clean up fibro asbestos sheeting used as landfill in school ovals and playgrounds.

It was common practice to use asbestos sheeting from demolished buildings as landfill for schools right up until the nineteen-eighties.

One school - Manly West Public School on Sydney's northern beaches - has tried to clean up the fragments on its school oval three times since they were discovered in 2012.

The local member for the area is Mike Baird, also the NSW Premier, who says that his Education Minister Adrian Piccoli has assured him that the asbestos had been removed.

But the chief executive of the Commonwealth Asbestos Safety and Eradication Agency (ASEA) says the method used was pretty meaningless.

The Education Department’s approach appears to have been “chicken picking” – where a team of people walk in a line and double-bag any fragments of asbestos they find.

The ASEA CEO, Peter Tighe, said that chicken picking is just “tokenism”.

“I mean it's a band-aid treatment for something which might be a greater problem,” Mr Tighe said.

“If there's smoke, there's fire. If you've got an indication that there's widespread contamination at a surface level, then surely what it needs is further investigation to ensure that there isn't an ongoing risk to the public, people playing sport or school children.”

He said the only real way to deal with an asbestos-laden oval would be to pull out the top soil, cover the area with PVC spray or a membrane, replace the top soil and returf the surface.

But this method is very costly.

Media reports say the Department of Education's schools asbestos register lists around 400 schools across the state that are on site-specific management plans.

Many of the plans called for “the removal, clean-up and disposal of the visible fragments of fibrous cement on the ground surface. Removal was limited to the accessible surface areas only”.

The Department of Education maintains that its asbestos management protocols are in keeping with work, health and safety legislation.