Canteen pre-order and allergy tracking at Greenfield Academy
Greenfield Academy serves 900 students across two lunch sittings. The canteen currently uses paper pre-order slips for the 14% of students who receive free meals and for anyone ordering a hot special. Slips are lost, allergy information is copied by hand, and the kitchen cannot forecast quantities; waste averages 18% of hot meals. A new system will let students order by QR code up to 24 hours ahead, store orders in a MySQL database, show a kitchen tablet list, and print a ticket at the till. Three students have severe nut allergies; one has a gluten allergy. The school has 60 minutes of IT support per day, a 100/20 Mbps connection, and a £6,000 one-off budget. The supplier offers a hosted package at £1,200 per year or a local server at £3,500 plus £300 per year. Staff need training, and the system must work if the internet fails at lunchtime.
1. Compare the hosted and local-server options. Recommend one, with figures and non-financial factors.
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Hosted: £1,200 per year, so £6,000 over five years, with no server hardware and vendor-managed updates; it needs the internet at lunchtime and a clear data-processing agreement for allergy data. Local server: £3,500 + 5 × £300 = £5,000 over five years, leaving £1,000 from the £6,000 budget for a UPS, backup disk and training. The local option is £1,000 cheaper over five years and can keep serving pre-orders if the broadband fails, which matters because lunch is a fixed 40-minute window. However, the school has only 60 minutes of IT support per day, so someone must patch the server, test backups and manage accounts; if that time is not protected, the local server becomes a security and availability risk. Recommendation: choose the local server only if the IT support time is formally allocated and a nightly off-site backup is scheduled; otherwise choose hosted and add a 4G router as a failover. Do not choose hosted without an offline contingency, because an internet outage at 12:00 would stop allergy checks and ticket printing.
2. Identify the validation and verification checks needed for allergy and order data.
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Validation: presence check on student ID and date; referential integrity so every order links to an existing student; dropdown list for menu items rather than free text; range check on the order date (today to +24 hours); one-order-per-student-per-day check; allergy flag must be selected from the medical record, not typed by the student; and a rule that blocks an order if the item's allergen list intersects the student's allergy list. Verification: show the student a confirmation screen with item, date, sitting and allergy warning; require a second click; print a ticket with the order ID; and have the kitchen compare the ticket against the tablet list at the start of service. Also use a hash or checksum on the nightly export, and reconcile the number of paid free-meal orders with the finance report. These checks catch both bad data entry and tampering.
3. Explain two risks of storing allergy data and how to reduce them.
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Risk 1: unauthorised access to allergy data. If a student or cleaner can log in at the kitchen tablet, they can see medical information. Reduce by role-based access: students see only their own order, kitchen staff see only today's allergy summary, and administrators use named accounts with multi-factor authentication. Encrypt the database and backups, and log every view of allergy data. Risk 2: an inaccurate allergy record causing an unsafe meal. If the nurse updates a record on paper but the database is not changed, the system may approve an unsafe order. Reduce by making the medical record the single source of truth, with a weekly reconciliation between the nurse and the system, and a manual override that requires the nurse's approval. A third risk is loss of orders if the local server fails; use a UPS, nightly off-site backup, and a printed fallback list of students with allergies.