As of Thursday morning (23rd April) over £20 million worth of eCodes have been converted into supermarket eGift cards by schools and families. Some good progress has been made, but our teams are still working tirelessly to make continued improvements to the scheme. Once again, we thank you for your continued patience.

We have had some reports of parents receiving a 16-digit eCode by post and taking these into supermarkets to try and spend them. As a reminder, supermarkets cannot accept eCodes, parents must first exchange them online for supermarket eGift cards.

Please see additional guidance below for posting either eGift cards or eCodes to parents/carers.

Guidance for issuing eGift cards by post

If a parent/carer does not have access to an email address or the internet, you can use the postal method as outlined in the user guide, ‘Option 2: self-distribution on behalf of families’ (p7).

This method requires you to order eCodes in bulk and redeem them online at http://www.freeschoolmeals.co.uk on behalf of parents and subsequently print and post the eGift Cards (which are in the form of a barcode). It is this eGift card which can be directly spent in-store at the supermarket.

Please note: you will need to order separate eCodes for each eligible household. You must also redeem each eCode separately, unless you are redeeming multiple eCodes for a single household with more than one eligible child. You will only receive one eGift card for each selected retailer in each eCode transaction.

It is important in this scenario to inform parents/carers of the correct instructions on how to redeem the eCodes as they cannot be directly spent in-store. Parents/carers must:

1. Go to http://www.freeschoolmeals.co.uk and enter their 16-digit eCode
2. Choose from the selection of supermarket eGift cards and enter the delivery email address at checkout
3. An email with the eGift card(s) will arrive within 24 hours
4. The email contains either a barcode, or a link to an online barcode that can be taken in-store to be spent

We also recommend sending a copy of the parent/carer FAQ document:

https://www.edenred.co.uk/Documents/DfE/DfE_FreeSchoolMeals_ParentCarerFAQs.pdf

Queuing system

Due to exceptional demand, we have implemented a queuing system on the ordering website. This is to control the amount of traffic on the website at any one time in order to improve the user experience for everyone and speed up the ordering process once past the queue.

Please note it can take up to an hour to enter the website, but this can vary during peak and off-peak hours. For a shorter queuing time, we recommend trying outside of peak hours or days, which is between 10am and 5pm, and on Mondays.