Just-Ask has been working in partnership with several local authorities on the creation of a school meals online portal to allow parents and children in primary education to order their lunch over the Internet. view case study

In most local authority areas in the UK the provision of school meals to junior and infant schools dates back many years and our aim is to modernise by harnessing new technologies. The current system requires parents to pay in cash (or cheque) at the beginning of each week and to pay for the entire week even if the parents want their children to take a school meal on a limited number of days.

Local authorities have experimented with cashless payment systems and other concepts but the core problems of inefficiency and limited choice remain. Just-Ask school meals online will seek to allow greater freedom of choice to parents, children and school caterers. The system will allow the parent/child to create their own account and order for 1 day, specific days, 1 week and by full or half term.

The main features are:

• Individual menu cycle automatically rotated
  
• Orders delivered to individual school automatically each day
  
• Several levels of access to portal; parent/child, local authority staff, school administrator's etc
• incremental sales feature; added fruit, drinks or snacks outside lunch time
  
• Packed 'lunch' for after school activities
  
• Multiple purchase options if more than one child at same school from same account
  
• Uniform purchases online
  
• School trip purchases online
  
• Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption for credit card payments and personal data
  
• Free school meals automatically added to accounts where appropriate with option to make top-up payments to free school meal accounts