A Cashless Catering System is a solution which is purpose designed to meet the ever evolving needs and demands of the catering provision, required by today’s schools and academies. The Trust-e Cashless Solution allows schools to be better able to provide their students and staff with a faster, more efficient and more appealing meal service.

Biometric is simply a method of identifying an individual person. The Trust-e Cashless System uses and algorithm based scan, which reads between 50 and 130 points on the finger/thumb. It is not a fingerprint in any way, shape or form and is of use only in the Cashless System.

The information of a pupil or staff member, who has been biometrically registered, is stored on a secure biometric controller within the school, which only your provider, Nationwide Retail Systems, can access with permission from the school. Once an account is credited, the pupil or staff member places their finger/thumb on the EPOS Terminal Biometric Reader, which looks up their account and allows them to purchase items using only this method of identification.

At the start of each academic year all Year 7 pupils will be registered where parental consent is received.  Students joining in-year will be informed of the process when they join.  Your child will attend at a requested time and will be required to place their finger/thumb on the Biometric Reader twice to obtain a matching template, which only takes a few seconds.

This can be accessed via your Arbor mail account

A maximum spend limit of £5.00 per day will be programmed into the system

Yes – the amount your child can spend throughout one day can be changed by written request to the school. Please see above for information on the current spend limits in place.

An automatic overdraft can be set up, which will allow the pupils to go into debit to £2.35 (Cost of one meal deal)

All free meal entitlements will be entered on to the system prior to the ‘live’ day. The Cashless Catering System will, on a daily basis, automatically allocate the appropriate accounts with the free school meal amounts. Pupils with FSM entitlement remain anonymous at all times as all account types are accessed in the exact same manner, regardless of whether paid for or not. Please note that any monies not spent from the daily free meal allocation will not be carried over to the next day.

No – due to the extensive security on biometric templates, no-one will be able to access your child’s account. As a secondary precaution, a photo image is allocated to each pupil (at the schools discretion).

Yes – the Cashless Catering Solution allows numerous reporting facilities, including dietary habits. These may be requested by contacting the Head of the School Kitchen. 

Yes, if your child is leaving the school, you may request that their balance is transferred to a sibling or for a refund if their balance is over £5.  Click here for a copy of the refund form.