At the very peak of the Covid pandemic, the DfE needed to find a solution to providing school meals for a growing number of household beneficiaries. The quickest and most flexible solution was to provide eligible families with vouchers that could be downloaded or requested by post and redeemed in nominated retailers.

Speed to market was absolutely key to the success of this much needed benefit support. The DfE turned to Edenred, an existing voucher scheme organisation who through their “Select” platform had a model that could be adapted for the campaign, with its own tool kit and business rules specific to the benefit programme. Within the dedicated portal there was advice and guidelines to ensure the public, schools and retailers could engage with the scheme with minimal fuss.

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This scheme was delivered in an incredibly short lead time enabling the DfE to mobilise this very high profile programme in record time. The scheme came in for a lot of press and public scrutiny, but the results were quite spectacular, over 128m meals were delivered by the end of summer through £483m government spend and 94% of user satisfaction with the scheme and its processes.

Judges’ quote

“The scale of the activity was amazing, and it must have been a pretty monumental undertaking. To maintain above 90% satisfaction in the process is seriously impressive, particularly for a scheme surrounded by negative publicity.”

Credit: Colin Hodgson, Edenred