Invitation to Tender for the Provision of a School Meals Cashless Payment Solution

The School Meals Service is run by the Warrington Borough Council (WBC) and provides a full catering service to 73 Warrington primary and special schools together with some other educational establishments.
There is a standard menu for all participating schools, which is changed twice a year. Food is prepared and served at each school.
Payment is currently made in the participating schools via cash, cheque or direct debit to the Schools Meals Service catering staff. The school then banks the payment to the School Meals Service bank account. The exceptions to this are 6 primary schools who have a cashless catering solution where parents can pay via an online account; tills within the school canteen register when a meal has been selected.
The School Meals Service is looking to offer a new School Meals Cashless Payment Solution (the “Solution”) as part of its service to all its participating primary and special schools. The Solution shall consist of two main functional elements, an online payments service and a cashless catering system.
Warrington Borough Council (the “Commissioner”) requires a cloud based externally hosted solution that shall:
• Provide a secure online payment service for collection of payments from parents to be used against the purchase of their child’s school meals.
• Provide parents with their own parental logon including a complete transactional view of payments made and balances held against individual child accounts.
• Provide online help and guidance and automatically alert the parent when their account is low or in debit via SMS or e-mail.
• Ensure that received funds are regularly deposited in the nominated School Meals Service bank account.
• Provide a cashless catering system externally hosted by the service provider and not hosted on the school or WBC premises.
• Within the cashless catering system, provide a meal registration facility deployed on hand-held, touch-screen, portable hardware provided by the Commissioner.
• Enable School Meals Service staff to identify a pupil and select a meal using the meal registration facility. On selection, the value of the meal is deducted from the online child account balance and the system records the transaction.
• Synchronise with the school MIS system to ensure that pupil, parent and staff data is accurate and up-to-date.
From the schools perspective the Solution should require very little management and school staff time to maintain. It shall also be easy to use by parents with no requirement for staff to respond constantly to parental queries regarding balances.
The Commissioner requires the Solution to be mobilised and ready to implement the Solution at early adopter schools during the school autumn term 2017. Then complete the total schools implementation by the end of the school summer term 2018.