A spokesperson, describing stories in the Sun Online and metro.co.uk as ‘sensationalised’, said the reality was that a minor glitch on February 11th affected ‘a handful’ of parents who were trying to make payments using the system.
“Unfortunately we did experience a technical issue, which meant that some of our customers experienced either a slow system response, or may have had difficulty completing their payment. The incident was fully resolved a week ago and we apologise to any of our customers who were affected.
"Incidents such as this should not mean that children are left unfed however. Schools have processes in place to enable them to continue service in these situations and most schools operate an overdraft facility to ensure they are able to provide food for all of their pupils.
"We informed all of our schools of the technical issue at the time of the incident to ensure that they were ready to invoke their procedures.”