To Worry About Giving My Bank Details to ParentPay If They're So Illiterate?

[JoffreyBaratheon]

A few months back, start of a new term and we couldn't buy our son's school dinners as their wobbly web-site crashed under the strain of more than six parents trying to use it at the same time. My eldest son, who is a programmer, told me it would have to be spectacularly amateur for that to happen on a website and said he'd worry giving his bank details - if they can't get the basics right, they probably have rubbish security.

Today I went on there and after several attempts managed to actually pay for my youngest's lunches. But check this out! I'm being forced (our school have no alternative) to give my bank details to these illiterates and - worse still - no school in the entire UK has pulled them up on it? Or are these not possessives?

toptrumps1

just out of idle curiosity, in what way would your "identity be cloned" (your words) because a high school holds a one-way hash of a fingerprint ?

Why on earth would schools go back to the old manual methods?! My secondary school has 1000 pupils. Let's say each parent tops up their child's lunch account twice each half term, so 900 kids (100 will get FSM) x 12 envelopes of cash/cheques - that's 11,000 envelopes a year. Add on what 5 trips/visits/book purchases per child per year. Another 5000 envelopes. 84 envelopes per day. Probably 1 or 2 staff members doing nothing but that job. What, £50k a year?

All to be opened, checked, counted, ticked off against the right child and item. And then all to be physically taken to the bank.

Or spend 1 or 2% of the total transaction on ParentPay or PayPal or similar - I'd guess our school takes in £1m, so 2% is less than half the price of employing people.

Lurkinghusband i wondered if someone would bring that up? Obviously, lots of people still think that fingerprint scanners store people's actual fingerprints (although I still struggle to know why that is such a security risk). For anyone thinking that, the fingerprints are stored as a mathematical representation of biometric data which cannot be reconverted to an image so no-one can duplicate the fingerprint again.

"My eldest son, who is a programmer, told me it would have to be spectacularly amateur for [site to crash] on a website and said he'd worry giving his bank details - if they can't get the basics right, they probably have rubbish security."

"My son told me that it was pretty incredible they went offline at a time of peak demand for a day or more, and that alone would make him worry they didn't keep financial info safe."

I think you're putting too much store by what your son the programmer has been saying. Now, if he was a capacity planner, or maybe even worked in security control ...

Our school has used ParentPay for a few years now, so I have noticed several upgrade phases -new features added, more info available. It is not unusual to have to take a system down as you carry out a major change - not ideal, but sometimes the safest/quickest way to effect the changes. Where a commerce site would do all it could to avoid that (worried they'd lose customers to another site) it may be that ParentPay know that can't happen so have taken the decision to apply upgrades in this manner.

With lots more schools using it now, I'd expect they'd have had to significantly increase their storage and transaction capacity, both of which are really independent of the site programs.

In short, the site being down occasionally does not point to them having poor security.

We've used parent pay for a few years, it is secure. It's also much easier than rooting for change.

As to lack of punctuation, it's a gripe but not a big deal, is it?

Unexpected

but even if you could recreate the fingerprint, what does it actually mean ? As opposed to the MILLIONS of fingerprints we leave behind us every waking hour of every waking day ?

Ignorance - especially prejudiced wilful ignorance - scares me. It's how mobs start.

I know, LurkingHusband I agree with you. There is so much hysteria about things like fingerprints when, as you pointed out, even if they could be recreated from a scanner, there are many, many far easier ways of obtaining one - although what you would do with it, I have no idea!

Lurking, I was a primary teacher. I never handled money in any complicated way. Wherever I worked, it always went straight to the office - it wasn't a hassle. It didn't slow us down.

When schools say they have saved x amount of money by using this kind of service, what are they on about? Do they employ less people in admin? Is that someone's wages they've 'saved'? I'm not sure. I'd rather people had jobs in communities than private companies made profit from the education service. Maybe that's weird.

Did they take it out to upgrade? Because the impression online at the time was that a server was down, or something. Which just made them look useless. If they paid a lot of money for a new website, maybe they should ask for a bit of it refunded as the site's front page has schoolboy howlers.

Because of my connectivity problems it took me about 50 minutes to pay today. Everyone in this village has intermittent problems with broadband. Now I used to take about 30 seconds to bung some money in an envelope. I don't care what is more convenient for the school - I'm more bothered about not losing half my morning, because I know if there is no money in the account (which is presumably making interest somewhere for someone - not me) - my son gets no lunch. This is true in many schools.

You'd presumably care if the TA in your child's class suddenly had to cover another other class as well though because the school could no longer afford to employ the other class's TA as it had to employ more office staff.

I don't know any primary schools with 1000+ students but several secondary schools which have that number, or more, students. How long would it take to count up all that money and cheques? Demands for money also tend to be more numerous at secondary and if you think that each year group and each department will have its own trips that seems like a full-time (and not very interesting) job to me. Apart from that, how are they supposed to get all this money to the bank? Carrying it there is probably only covered by insurance up to about £1,000, above that you need 2 people and above a certain limit is not covered at all (depending on your specific insurance cover). So then you need a contract with Securicor or someone to come and bank it for you - more money.

I can quite see why schools like services like Parentpay.

No-one's even mentioned the fact that if you were to incur a loss through parentpay your bank would reimburse you as you would not have been negligent. Oh, and 'switch' has been visa debit or delta for many years now.

Unexpected, I have worked in a number of inner city primary schools that were way bigger than my sons' secondary school. It's possible.

amy - I thought what you're saying was too obvious to mention. But then again, why should anyone be inconvenienced? Thanks for the heads up about 'Switch'. As you're so... fastidious about petty details - I'm surprised you're not more outraged by the apostrophes.

You're not convincing me that it doesn't matter that a site set up for the use of schools, has errors that a Y5 kid should be able to spot.

Oh I'm with you on the apostrophes but think it's irrelevant to the security concerns.
I like to point out the obvious if I have any doubt as to whether or not it's been noticed as very occasionally it has not been noticed IYSWIM.

ParentPay has been fine for us. In fact, there have been moans about the PTA not being able to use it for their events.

I like the fact that I can pay on credit card and I like the fact that I get Tesco points on my major purchase that is the ski trip by paying on my Tesco credit card. Our school will also allow a child to go "overdrawn" by one meal on their account to ensure they don't go without at lunchtime.

I don't like that my DC can buy lots of nice, tasty snacks on a whim, but that's my problem, not ParentPay's (notice the correct use of an apostrophe there!)

I WISH my DD's (large, secondary) school would have ParentPay! I am sick and tired of constantly having to round up pound coins for lunch money. I think I'd put up with any number of misused apostrophes if I didn't have to do that any more...