Customer Success Story:
Devon County Council
Background
Across the UK, around 250,000 children are estimated to be eligible for Free School Meals but are not currently receiving them. In many cases, this is because families need to complete an application, a process that can be confusing, time-consuming, or easy to miss.
Recognising this challenge, Devon County Council took steps to make free school meals more accessible to those who needed it.
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Enabling 1,300 More Children to Receive Free School Meals in Devon!
At Sentinel, we helped by introducing an auto-enrolment approach. Our platform securely matches DWP data with council pupil records, automatically identifying every child entitled to FSM. The fully configurable service allowed Devon to simply input their data, while our off-the-shelf DWP ingester processed it instantly.
Through an intuitive portal, automated matching and eligibility checks highlighted newly identified pupils for quick review. Council teams could confidently approve or reject entries with a complete audit trail, and all outcomes were seamlessly fed back into EMS systems like ImPulse and Capita, keeping records accurate and up to date without manual effort.
Results
1,000+ Devon pupils now receive FSM
Schools gained £1.5m in additional pupil premium funding
Significant reduction in manual processing.
Ensuring no child goes hungry with an opt out option
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"Without the use of Sentinel, we expected to have a completely manual process of matching data on Excel spreadsheets – which would have been incredibly time consuming and bound to have inaccuracies... Overall, Sentinel makes the process safer, quicker and future proofed."
Tyler Sluman
Devon County Council
Benefits
Increase uptake
Improve accuracy
Cuts admin time
Increases funding
Opt out options
Integrate back into EMS systems