Online Free School Meals, led by Hertfordshire CC and part of the Department for Children, Schools and Families' GES Connect Digitally change programme, has come out as overall winner of the GC Awards for 2010.
The awards, which recognise excellence in public sector IT, are the longest established in the field and are supported by the Cabinet Office, Socitm and the British Computer Society.
Online Free School Meals, launched in April 2009, was designed for use by any local authority in England, integrating their systems to a central service that enables parents or carers to apply online for free school meals. It automatically notifies the schools so the meals can be made available as early as the following day.
While councils are responsible for the provision of school meals, they have to use data from the Department for Work and Pensions, HM Revenue and Customs and the Home Office. This is pulled into an integrated hub that enables councils to check for eligibility.
The system also includes web interfaces for local authorities, with authentication and encryption processes to provide security, and connection to the Government Secure Intranet.
The senior team of public sector officials who judged the entries were impressed by its wide reach, clear value to the public, and the financial benefits it has produced. In its first seven months it provided estimated savings of more than £7.8m, with a projection this could rise to £31.5m if all 152 eligible councils take it up.
Mark Say, editor of GC Magazine and chair of the judging panel, said: "This project really ticked all the boxes for the judges, providing clear benefits for people who really need the service, and showing it could be easily picked up by councils that are not yet using it.
"It's notable that it also grappled with the highly sensitive issue of data sharing. The team behind it clarified the legal aspects of making data from the departments accessible to the officials running the eligibility checks, and struck the balance between providing a faster, more convenient service while protecting applicants' privacy.
"We had a record number of entries this year, over 230 from all parts of the public sector, and Online Free School Meals won decisively against some high quality competition."
The project also won the award for the Collaborative Working category.
Winners in the other categories of the GC Awards were:
Delivering efficiencies - Xchange Wales - the Value Wales team in the Welsh Assembly Government;
Customer services – Debt Relief Order Project – the Insolvency Service;
Transformation – Waste Management Project – London Borough of Harrow;
Shared services – Schools Recruitment Service – Department for Children, Schools and Families;
Innovator of the year – Carl Faulkner, head teacher of Normanby Primary School, Middlesborough.
Staff
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