Solihull Makes School Dinner Payments
Online and telephone school payments
extend authority’s customer service platform

Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council is allowing parents to make payments for all school-related items through its ‘One Front Line’ customer service platform. 

Solihull MBC has successfully operated electronic swipe card payments in Secondary Schools for children’s school meals.  In a trial programme involving four schools in Solihull, parents can now make both automatic telephone payments and online e-payments for meals, school trips and one off items such as uniforms, through Civica’s ‘One Front Line’ platform.

Civica has provided a series of repayment software systems to Solihull MBC in recent years, helping the council to build a complete payment structure across business rates, rents, bulky objects delivery and pest control – all activated either through an Internet visit or phone call.

The new schools payment service will bring further safety and operational benefits to the local authority. It avoids the need for children to bring cash to school and provides parents with certainty that the money is being spent in schools.  In addition, the new system is able to handle both primary schools’ weekly ‘cashless catering’ school meals costs and secondary schools’ discretionary payment systems, which support students choosing their own lunch items. 

The system also reduces the amount of time which school staff spend on checking and handling cash while cutting the council’s own costs for back end processing of multiple small monetary transactions.

Paul Blantern, Corporate Director- Customer Services, Solihull MBC, sees the flexible payments as a further advance for the authority: “We have designed ‘One Front Line’ around customers’ needs. The software payments channel enables local parents to pay for different school-related items quickly and simply, with the scope to make other payments such as council tax at the same time.” 

The service will be trialled at the Alderbrook and Lode Heath secondary schools and the Coleshill Heath and Langley primary schools. Solihull MBC customer services plans to roll the full ICON software payment platform out to all of the borough’s 76 schools later in the year.

Paul Blantern says flexibility is vital to customer service: “With innovations like this, Solihull residents can access a range of services from one call centre or Internet platform. We are achieving further customer-centric service, irrespective of the type of customer or their particular service needs.”