ParentPay Reviews 

**Absolutely unacceptable payment system**

Customer service is practically non-existent. When you call, you’re told the service is for schools only, while support tickets raised online are closed instantly without a satisfactory response.

Two of my children have experienced being unable to purchase food at school because their ParentPay payment was declined despite sufficient funds being available. On another occasion, a system outage lasting around two weeks prevented accounts from being topped up.

What is particularly concerning is the lack of communication. Parents received no clear email, website system status explaining the outages, what caused them, or what safeguards were being put in place to prevent the same thing happening again.

This is more than an inconvenience — children need reliable access to food and drinks at school. It is completely unacceptable for a child to be left unable to buy food because of a payment system failure that is entirely outside their control.

I genuinely cannot understand why schools use this system when a simple card payment machine would surely be more reliable and straightforward.

Parents deserve better, and most importantly, children should never go without food or a drink because a payment system fails.

This company holds a monopoly position so there is no incentive not to be totally rubbish. My child left school several months ago and neither Parentpay nor the school have refunded the surplus amount in his account. Parentpay claim the school has to refund the balance but the school haven't actioned the refund. Parentpay are happy to take your money, so Parentpay should be legally liable for refunding it, not the school. Rubbish.

I have requested a refund over 5 times in the last 3 months and I have still not gotten my money back.
I have tried contacting them using their help service in the website and directly through email, and I have gotten no response. Their customer service is shocking and terrible
They should be ashamed of themselves.

Without doubt one of the worst payment management systems out there. Clunky to use, doesn't attribute the right amount. Any school that uses them should hang their heads in shame

After complaining, they have contacted me and the issue is resolved. It should not have needed a complaint to fix it, so I am changing the level to 3 stars.

If I could only give zero stars. My child moved schools and they refuse to take down the old school site even though all bills are paid and actually the old school does not use it anymore! Ignored emails to remove the old school saying the old school hadn't requested it, which they had.
I am very concerned about their information security which I have zero confidence in.

Simply awful. Links are broken, feedback form is not working. Customer support is hopeless.
Unfortunately this is chosen pay system by my school. Cannot wait to stop using it.

No stars

My child trip got cancelled & they told me that I’d have the 175 back in my account in 5 days still waiting absolutely ridiculous school use this site and can’t believe from the reviews I’m not the only one !!!

No contact number stupid robots replying to emails and no humans bollocks!!!

It doesn't even deserve one star. Absolutely horrendous. Every monday i am stressed out trying to access this pathetic site. Yes there may well be a lot of traffic but they have pretty much every school on this site. If they are not able to sort their servers out the schools shouldn't even be using it. Yes I could try other days, but monday is the start of the week, it should be expected that the volume of traffic will be high and servers capable of dealing with that should be put in place. If I wasn't forced to use this site, I never would.

My account has been hacked. I have tried to contact parentpay but its been several days and they have not replied. No phone number available. They system has all my bank details - yet parentpay have no means by which to help.

This website completely fails in its primary purpose, to allow parents to pay for school meals and trips. For the second week running, the payments system is not working. Also, they have introduced more and more complexity to the system, you now need umpteen clicks to get to where you need to be, even when it is working. I guess the money still keeps rolling in for the owners though, so why would they care?

Child frequently going without lunch as low balance notifications don't come through or parent pay not working when I need to top up. Also there should be an overdraft system so children are not refused food at the check out when they have insufficient funds temporarily

Awful customer service. Schools, please find a better system to use, unless you want parents to constantly email you because they are having problems logging in. The system for parents is often down. When trying to log into the parents system, I get an error message that reads: "Sorry, it looks like something went wrong
Try going back and retrying your last action. You can contact us if the problem persists and we will do our best to help."
I keep trying to load the page for about an hour. I try on my phone and on my desktop on two different browsers. Same problem simply trying to log in.
When I go to the customer support page, there is a directory of common problems, but none of them address this clearly.
There is no clearly visible email address or method of contacting support directly.
I have used this app for 7 years and it seems to be getting worse. Not able to deal with Browser or app complexities. Blaming of users rather than the reliability of the app.

One of the most dispicable organisations I have ever had the displeasure of working with. They stop short physically stealing money from the children, but that is essentially what they do for a living. The government needs to do more to regulate these kinds of 3rd party leeches, sucking the tax-payer-funded lifeblood out of schools, all for profit. Sickening.

WHY ARE SCHOOLS USING THIS USELESS COMPANY????!

If your school uses or starts using this company COMPLAIN immediately. How they are still operating is beyond me! And why schools use them is crazy!

They have such a useless online system that it crashes all the time leaving you unable to supply any money for your child's lunch. This is the third time this school year I've not been able to load cash for my child so he can buy food and drink. This means he will be coming home today starving having NOTHING to eat all day. He has his breakfast at break time, so he won't have been able to buy anything then, and nothing for lunch either as he has NO MONEY ON YOUR SYSTEM!

Customer service is APPALLING, Basically there is NO customer service. No telephone number. Just an email address which you are lucky if they even bother replying to, but if they do they are rude and unhelpful and reply 2-3 days later. ZERO help what so EVER. AND never an apology and never fixing the problem.

They simply do not care that their system is NOT FIT FOR PURPOSE and happy to let kids go hungry all day. Then you try ringing the school to explain and they say as it's an external company, that all the parents are ringing the school, but there is nothing they can do, that they can't help! Disgusting!

DO NOT USE PARENT PAY AND TELL YOUR SCHOOL HOW USELESS THEY ARE IF YOU SEE PLANS TO USE THEM. THEY SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED TO OPERATE.

absolutely worthless,so often not working at all, can't login, can't pay for my daughter things in the school, can't pay for lunch, she's hungry at school,but website say only "try another time " again,again and again,support not working,this website been force in to school plan and should be withdrawn imediately its just irritating

Absolute garbage company. Schools should just ban them, they have zero customer services and plenty of times the website for parents is not available.

If I could give a zero star rating then I would, since a new company has taken over it's stopped working. The ai chat bot is hopeless in trying to get answers. It's a shame it's been taken over as it worked well

Poor customer service, cannot talk to anyone, it's all ai, and not been able to use the service for the last 5 days, cannot pay for my sons school trip as it won't let me pay for anything, information only is on the screen. Tried to tell ai the problem but it doesn't understand, so frustrating

Auto-top up stopped working with no warning and has not worked for over 2 months now. Every attempt I made to contact support about this was ignored. I raised a ticket twice (one 3 weeks ago and one this week), and I still havent heard back. They really don't care. The Help & Support bot is totally useless, and - yes - everyone has a bot these days, but most bots let you talk to a human if you ask for it. This one completely ignores that request.

Terrible cash is better. You cant top up within 3 days
Cash is better for children