Facial Recognition offers a quick and secure way for students to purchase school meal items without needing cash and the risk of losing cards or forgetting PIN code. With Facial Recognition, students simply select their meal, look at the camera and go, speeding up the lunchtime service with a contactless point-of-sale experience. 

Student feedback suggests that the use of Payment Cards can be slow when many have been forgotten, which causes extended queue times in our canteen. The new system eradicates the need for students to use cards to identify themselves and Facial Recognition can cut transaction times by 25% to only a few seconds per student!

This technology will be used as an additional authentication method at the checkout counters, providing faster service for students. Our goal is to help students reclaim time to enjoy their meal breaks and nutritious meals and make it easier to attend lunch clubs.

With Facial Recognition technology, students simply choose their meal, look at the checkout camera, and proceed with a quick and secure point-of-sale experience. 

Facial Recognition is a biometric recognition method that works in the same way as other recognition technology, including on smartphones which your child might be used to. Like a PIN, a unique identifier is attributed to each student and matched at the till for quick and secure access to their cashless account. 

An image of the face is captured, and the software turns unique features of the face geometry, such as the distance between the eyes and the distance from the top of the forehead to the chin, to create a unique identifier for each student. 

 When students pay for their meal items at the point of sale, the camera matches their unique identifier to their cashless account to take payment. 

The process for the Point of Sale (PoS) is below. 

1. Point of Sale (PoS) devices that have facial recognition enabled will have a USB web-camera attached.   
2. An authorised member of staff logs into the PoS using their credentials.   
3. While the PoS does not have a user account present, the operator will see a feed from the attached web-camera.  
4. When a user presents themselves to be identified, the operator must manually initiate the recognition process by tapping on the users face from the feed. There is no automated scanning.  
5. At this point, the system will crop the image to only select the selected users face (so if multiple faces are in the frame, these are discarded and ignored, and the system compares this against the database of previously registered users.  
6. If a match is found, the account is opened, and the operator can perform the sale of the items the user wishes to purchase.  

 Following on from the above; after an authentication attempt, if there is no match found, the image captured is immediately destroyed. 

Biometrics, in this case, provides a unique identifier for the person present at the checkout. The unique identifier is created by processing the biometric capture through a mathematical algorithm, generating a unique number. Only this number is stored; the captured image is not retained. This data is encrypted using AES 256 (similar to encryption used by your online banking) and cannot be reversed to produce an image of the biometric, ensuring the highest level of security and compliance. 

We anticipate introducing the system in Summer 2026. We will contact all parents / carers again before the go-live date. 

No. Use of the system is entirely optional. Any student for whom we do no have consent will be issued with a physical payment card or PIN. 

Biometrics authenticates people based on their unique characteristics and identifies possible matches to ensure accurate and secure identification. Facial Recognition is a type of biometrics that we use in various aspects of life, including:

• Security: unlocking phones, accessing secure buildings, and logging into accounts
• Identification: faster check-ins at airports and hospitals
• Convenience: logging into computers and making payments for school meals 

Biometric recognition operates on a closed-loop system, which means student data is stored on our secure database. The server used is a local server in school. There are currently no plans to change this, but if there were, the school hosts some applications in Azure, and in this instance the provider would be Microsoft using a UK data centre.

Biometrics, in this case, provides a unique identifier for the person present at the checkout. The unique identifier is created by processing the biometric capture through a mathematical algorithm, generating a unique number. Only this number is stored; the captured image is not retained. This data is encrypted using AES 256 (similar to encryption used by your online banking) and cannot be reversed to produce an image of the biometric, ensuring the highest level of security and compliance. The template cannot be reversed to recreate an image of the individual’s face.

Facial recognition is only available at the Point of Sale and is always operated by an authorised member of school or catering staff. CRB Cunninghams do not share the face template data and do not utilise facial recognition in any way other than for this intended purpose. 

After taking an image of the student, their name, official school photo (read from our MIS) and account details appear on the till (as they currently do when presenting their payment card) where staff can check that the image matches the person standing in front of them.

No, the information is never shared, and the face template representing the childs’ faces is meaningless to anyone else. The software turns your child’s image into a mathematical algorithm, and the stored information cannot be used to recreate the face image.  The facial recognition data captured during registration can only be used for the purpose of cashless catering identification and cannot be reconstructed to create an image of your child and as such would be impossible to be used for any other purpose.

All biometric data can be deleted; the school is the data controller and can delete the data from its databases. You can opt-out anytime, meaning the school will delete the biometric data. 

The system will only capture and store facial recognition templates for a user where the system has explicitly been set as having permission to do so . The school (as Data Controller) is required to communicate with users (and their parents/guardians where the user is below the GDPR age of consent) to ensure that they understand what the system is, how it stores, and how it uses the data. The school must gain and record consent from the user before manually enabling facial recognition for them in the system.  

No. Our catering staff must activate the process at the point of sale for students that have consented to use facial recognition. The system is not live; the cameras only capture students' images for the transaction process when the still staff activates the software. 

We will only use the system for those students for whom we have received consent to do so. Simply do not consent if you do not wish your child to be involved.

Yes. This can be viewed at this link, and our proposed system and method of consent is compliant with this. A full DPIA (Data Impact Assessment) will be conducted before the system goes live, and this can be made available to parents on request).

Please email us via catering@ringwood.hants.sch.uk and we will remove your consent and issue your child with a PIN code to use instead.