Many families of children that are eligible for free school meals are experiencing delays of up to a week for the supermarket vouchers meant to replace the meals while schools are shut
Under the government scheme, families in need in England should be receiving supermarket vouchers worth £15 a week per child, to substitute the free school meals usually provided.
According to the Department for Education, the Edenred website that runs the scheme was rebuilt over the weekend, but some schools say they are still struggling to log on and access the scheme.
On Tuesday, Danny Sohal, the business and resources manager at Chiswick School, in west London, said that the vouchers their school had ordered on the 7th of April had finally been approved, but had not yet been emailed to the parents.
However orders from the 8th of April are yet to have been processed.
Whose who attempted to log onto the Edenred platform to access the scheme, were still being met with error messages, and telephone queuing times were over an hour.
According to Mr Sohal, he had been told that the error messages were being sent as a way to try and limit traffic to the site and allow Edenred to work through their backlog of email and callers, which, he added, could be up to 16 million vouchers.
The Department for Education said the site was down for maintenance on Thursday, in order to implement an upgrade to the system, to boost capacity in the face of massive demand.
Last week, ministers announced the scheme would run throughout the Easter holidays.
Arout 1.3 million children in England are entitled to free school meals and, until the scheme was announced, schools had been making their own arrangements in order to help those families that require extra help.
Schools across the UK have been closed since last month to all pupils except the children of key workers such as doctors, nurses and delivery drivers, some vulnerable children and those with more serious special educational needs.
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