To think £5 is a shameful fee to replace a school child's Squidcard

[5Foot5]

DDs school introduced a payment card (Squid) for the school canteen about a year ago.

About a week ago she came home and told me she thought she had lost her card. She had used it at lunch time and now couldn't find it anywhere. I had just topped it up that morning and it had about £16 of credit on it so I went online to see what to do.

It seemed fairly efficient. I could register the card as lost which meant that it was immediately blocked. Then the instructions said that she had to request a new one from school and the credit would be transferred to the new card. We did all of this -so far so good.

However, when she came to collect the replacement she was told there was a £5 fee! I was pretty shocked - occasionally DH or I have lost credit/debit cards and the bank always replaces them immediately with no suggestion of a fee.

When I checked the website the terms and conditions said that they might charge a fee where a card has been replaced twice in a six month period. Now this is the first time she has lost it so I sent an email querying the fee but they claim that when I reported it lost there were some FAQs that mentioned it.

Obviously we had to pay the £5 given the card was worth £16, but I think this is a pretty outrageous amount - especially given the cards are used for children's dinner money.

Has anyone else encountered this scheme?

Yes Casey, I have the power

We have fingerprints at one school, cash at another and WisePay cards at a third .

All three schools are quite kindly about dishing out the grub anyway if the child has mislaid their cash/card/hand or has the kind of parent who forgets to proffer any form of real or virtual money -- but the card-based one does, yes, charge £5 to replace. Not sure what they charge for replacement fingers yet.

DDs school uses squid - it pisses me off as there is a minimum top up amount so squid has all our money sloshing around gaining interest, so to charge for a replacement card on top of that is taking the mickey.

DS' school uses fingerprint scanning - I'm one of the people that Casey thinks are thick as I declined to allow DS to have his fingerprint scanned; on the basis that
(a) I am too thick to understand the technology used as it was never explained to parents that it was reference points as opposed whole fingerprint;
(b) government organisations are forever losing data - I don't want my childs information and fingerprints in there and
(c) he can use a PIN to charge his lunch to it.

My old work used to use biometric fingerprints for the staff and the students (private college). It would register our presence at work and tell the management exactly what time you arrived, left, went to another building....creepy. It also sent you an automatic 'you are late, best have a good excuse' email when you were 2 minutes late (sent to everyone else who was late, along with the time they arrived) but funnily enough, never acknowledged the 99% of the time you were early or stayed til 9pm. Funny that.

Glad to be out of there....

Mirai - or when the teacher collected the dinner money at the beginning of each week - just before you had your free bottle (often warm) milk .

Absolutely standard, university library cards were £5 15 years ago.

Only way to stop students just getting a new on every-time they've left it at home.

Extremely annoying, especially as they often reappear the day after you've bought them.

What really fucks me off is having to pay £5 plus postage for a new bus pass.

We live in the middle of no where, it's a dedicated service. The driver knows all the DCs. No one is going to use it to get to work for free without being noticed.

Why does some jobs worth periodically decide to check passes. The council could save it's self ££ by just sending one letter in Y7.

My school uses fingerprints, as explained above we only store part of the data. For the paranoid a pin number can be used instead, but the y7s tend to forget theirs. We really do hold very much more sensitive data on the students than a bit of their fingerprint. They can be toppednup online, or in school. The huge problem with cash is that the students can spend it on sweets/fags on the way to school and you don't know plus the risk of bullying. We are talking about secondary school here and with huge numbers of students, and numerous till points in the refectory there is no way you would know if every student has eaten, particularly as many bring packed lunches.
My own dcs school uses cards and online top up and they charge to replace them.

£5 is a perfectly fair charge for replacing a card and transferring the credit onto another one.

Do you really think they should provide this service for free? I can't see any reason why they should, especially as you don't have to pay to register or to use the service when you first begin.

Tell your child that if she loses her card, she pays. It's her responsibility, so it's fair enough. We have a fingerprint system, but I've told my ds he will have to pay the £6 charge if he needs a replacement locker key.

One of the schools we looked uses the finger print system

For one of our three schools you can look up exactly what they bought online... bwahahahaaaaaa

I have a nosy every few weeks and point out to DS2 that 'healthy varied lunch' and 'daily consumption of iced bun' have very little overlap. He reforms his ways for a while. I forget to check for a bit. And repeat...

I also check to see what DS has purchased for lunch etc - pizza at break time and BLT at lunch time is never good combination - but then he does two hours of sport after school most days I suppose.

Oh, DS2 is fit as a flea -- long, lean and muscular, annoyingly enough for his careful, salad-eating, solid little sister. I'd just prefer him to have the odd vitamin and still have some teeth left by 20.

I know what you mean - I ask him to get some fruit and veg - he says there's tomato and lettuce in a BLT !

We have squidcards.

Dd1+2 (7+5) were told to take them home at end of summer term but i never saw the cards and by start of new school year we coukdn't find them.

They were replaced free and if only took a couple of mins to update the computer.

I think £5 is excessive.

WTF

I thought I recognised this thread title! I started it about 18 months ago
It looks as though it got resurrected so someone could start a discussion on keeping fingerprint data. Odd

Not an unreasonable fee at all.

And I really don't get why people are paranoid about one single fingerprint being held on file (even if it were a whole print). What on earth do you think they can do with it?!

That's really annoying 5foot5 - why do people do it - on hang on it is half term !