We provide a meal service featuring a wide range of healthy options, which is accessible before school and at break time and lunch time.

The cost of a school meal rises from £2.35 to £2.50 in September 2022

We also operate a Breakfast club every day from 8:00am. Students can grab a free bagel or cereal from the Dining hall to start the day.

Cashless catering

The school uses a cashless catering system in the dining hall, which enables us to provide a more efficient breakfast, break time and lunch service by reducing queuing times for students.

Parents and carers can top up student accounts through the Schoolgateway app or webpage. If you would like more details please visit https://schoolgateway.co.uk/

Benefits of School Gateway

  • Parents can pay for school meals in advance rather than on a daily basis thereby reducing the risk of loss or theft.
  • Student accounts can be ‘topped’ up as and when required.
  • Students entitled to free school meals remain anonymous, as they will purchase meals in the same way as other students.
  • Cheque payments can be made to the school which will be loaded onto student accounts. This reduces the need for students to carry cash if this is parental preference.

In order to operate the cashless catering system student accounts are activated using a finger recognition system. When the student account is set up an image is taken of the finger which is subsequently encrypted into a 4 digit number. Please note that the actual fingerprint will not be stored. The data stored for each student will be held in accordance with Becta guidelines and will be kept in accordance with data protection regulations. All information will be destroyed when the student leaves the school.

Frequently asked questions

No, the image of an individual’s finger scan is never stored in a database or computer file. The image of the fingerprint is transferred from the fingerprint scanner into the computer via an encrypted data path. Feature extraction is then performed where unique points such as where ridges end or change direction are identified and their locations recorded. These form the feature template which is stored in the database for later comparison. Only the template is stored in the database. The number of unique features stored for each fingerprint can vary from ten to as many as forty depending on the complexity and quality of the fingerprint. It is impossible from this stored representation to recreate the original fingerprint image as virtually all the original information has been discarded during the template extraction phase.

The amount of information retained is sufficient to identify an individual from a database of a few hundred or a few thousand using a special algorithm but is totally inadequate for forensic use and could not be used in a court of law to prove identity. The standards for forensic matching are very much higher and require the original fingerprint image.

The system works exceptionally well when dealing with small groups of people from a few hundred to a few thousand. During enrolment a new template is created and compared against those already in the database. This is a controlled environment and only enough detail is stored to distinguish this group of people from each other. There is not enough information stored about the characteristics of the finger scan to scale this up to a national database.

Only one copy of the template is stored in the database and when the individual is deleted from the system the template is completely obliterated.

All the finger scan data captured is the property of the school and is only stored on a computer within the school. The data is classified as personal information under the data protection act and therefore must be treated in exactly the same way as other personal data. Schools already have systems and procedures in place to protect the significant personal information they hold on their pupils. In this controlled environment the security and privacy of an individual can be assured.

Digital finger scan data is personal data within the definition of the Data protection act, so the database is treated with the same care as any other personal data recorded by the school so as to conform to the data protection legislation.