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Background
Croydon Council has over 120 schools, served by both external catering providers and schools with delegated authority. Half of secondary schools and four primary schools use cashless catering systems. This developed out of a need for reform:

• Workforce Reform – need to reduce amount of administration time for school meals
• Corporate Reform – to reduce youth crime, bullying, anti-social behaviour, petty theft
• Health & Wellbeing – to have school meal data to feed into obesity reduction and other children’s health related strategies

What did you do?
A ‘Data Warehousing Project’ was set up – through the installation of a central control and central reporting system. This is a major 12 month programme, which is still in the roll-out phase with 4 new schools per week. A high level evaluation of the project is underway with a completion target of September 2008.

What system do you use?
In secondary schools a mixture of biometric, photo recognition biometric fingerprints or cards is used. In primary schools, the system is Touch Screen photo identification. The
schools had a choice based on suitability to their particular needs. Secondary Schools made a contribution to overall costs of hardware.

Why did you choose it?
A market leader supplier was chosen because of prior experience with them and because they were willing to work with the authority to help develop a new system unlike any in existence. A company was required that could be trusted to deliver to the authority’s specifications. – Nationwide Retail Systems Ltd were awarded the contract.

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