DfE - ECS

The DfE (Department for Education) - ECS (Eligibility Checking Service) will provide a real time response when requesting whether a person has entitlement to Free School Meals.

We send a message like this, which takes the data from the form to do so:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<SubmitSingleQueryRequest xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
  <SystemId>SOMETHING</SystemId>
  <Password>APASSWORD</Password>
  <LocalAuthorityId>IEG4</LocalAuthorityId>
  <RequestedServiceVersion>20170701</RequestedServiceVersion>
  <UserToQuery>
    <Surname>MCMAHON</Surname>
    <DateOfBirth>1980-07-09</DateOfBirth>
    <NiNo>JK949233D</NiNo>
  </UserToQuery>
  <SourceType>CITIZEN</SourceType>
  <EligibilityCheckType>FSM</EligibilityCheckType>
  <ServiceType>SHARED</ServiceType>
</SubmitSingleQueryRequest>

And get a response like this if a person is eligible:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<SubmitSingleQueryResult xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
  <ExtensionData />
  <EligibilityStatus>1</EligibilityStatus>
  <ErrorCode>0</ErrorCode>
  <Qualifier />
</SubmitSingleQueryResult>

Important

If a person is eligible as a result of this check, the Benefit Check is bypassed as they already qualify for the payment.

Prerequisite

Getting access to the DfE's ECS is normally relatively tricky, as the council needs to complete documentation illustrating how any service will work and interact with their service, which contains relatively sensitive information.

IEG4 has a completed template for this where only a few localisations are required to make the process extremely quick.

The DfE will provide the necessary system, user, password information upon successfully passing the necessary checks.