Paying for School Lunches

At Commonweal, we expect all students to remain on site at lunchtime, unless written permission is sought by parents at the start of the year.

When students enroll on the first day of the September term, we will issue School Network Accounts and a scan will be taken of their index fingertip. The optical scanner works in the same way as a digital camera; random points of the fingertip are broken down into data points and are converted to what is essentially a string of random numbers. No-one has access to this information and the stored data points can never be viewed as anything other than a string of numbers and letters, so please be assured this software is very secure. Where parents have advised that they wish their child to be excluded from this initiative they will not, of course, have their fingertip scanned.

Our preferred method of payment for school meals is Arbor Payments via the Arbor Parent Portal. More information on this detailed here.

Making a Payment

Within the Arbor Parent Poral App, scroll down to the Accounts (All Students) and you’ll see the current meal balances for each child you have registered at the school.

Select the student you wish to top up the balance for

Click the ‘Top Up Account’ button on the Meals Balance Overview screen

Enter the Payment amount (Min. £2) and click Pay Now where you will asked for your card details to complete the payment.  If you use Apple Pay, you can click that button and quickly add the funds via this method.  It is not possible to store card details with Arbor at this time.

Please note: it takes at least 10 minutes for the funds to be available after a payment has been made online.