The local authority has deactivated the automatic school meal cash balance email to parents/carers with immediate effect, due to a issues linked to system upgrade work on the cashless catering system.

Civica Cashless Solutions previously extracted parent e-mail information from SIMS to produce pupil account balance information. However, as I am sure you will be aware, we have now moved to use the ‘Wonde’ system.  The Civica system downloads pupil information via Wonde and then forwards that information to the council’s email system as a scheduled task, in order to generate a pupil balance email for parents. Unfortunately, due to a system issue, some emails are being sent to unintended recipients, leading to potential data protection and/or safeguarding issues.

As Civica is not responsible for the validity of the data used to send balance e-mails and as the Council’s e-mail system cannot cleanse the data to ensure the correct emails go to the correct parents/carers, the local authority has had to take the decision to shut down the pupil balance email alert system for the time-being, to avoid any data protection or safeguarding breaches.

I would be grateful if you could advise parents of this issue and that the local authority is working closely with Civica for a solution to allow the reinstatement of automatic email balance alerts in the near future.

I am grateful for your cooperation in this matter.