Many of you are anxiously waiting to receive your Certificates from the RHS for February exams. The completed Certificates/Diplomas will now be sent out later this week.

It's a long and involved saga which doesn't reflect particularly well on the RHS Exams Department, I'm afraid.

On the Wednesday of exam week we received a delivery at North Moreton containing Certificates  - and it was a surprisingly slim package, because the RHS normally send all administration paperwork for all three  of our centres to North Moreton, because there is always someone in to receive parcels  ( If urgent packages go to Garden Organic's offices for us, it may take some time to collect them as we are there mainly at weekends, and they don't work at weekends....)

After opening it and querying it with the RHS I found that

1. the Ryton Certificates had been sent to GO ( not a problem during exam week, I asked our invigilator to collect it, and they promised to remind new staff to send everything to North Moreton in future)

2. The RHS has decided not to issue unit awards any more  - in other words, if you passed one or two exams in February, you don't get that piece of 'award' paper listing the units you've passed.  In future if you want proof of the individual units you have passed  before you achieve a full Certificate, you are expected to download this from the Candidate Portal yourself. The same applies to the individual units making up a practical Certificate. So the parcel only contained completed Certificates/Diplomas and so was much smaller than usual.

This wasn't a particularly helpful time to be told about the change  - during term, when we could explain this to students, might have been sensible. After they'd been sent to us was rather late....

It got better the next day when we received a recall notice saying there was an error in the printing ( a 'problem with communication' - they didn't ask the printer to put the date on them) and we mustn't issue the Certificates and return them securely when asked.  They would send replacements as soon as possible, but unfortunately these would go to exactly the same addresses as the previous ones as it was too difficult to change this at short notice.

So the exam Certificates arrived midweek, and as term has ended at Ryton I collected the second set from Garden Organic on Friday;  Natasha will be sending them out towards the end of next week.

If you haven't taken the final exams for a Certificate, there won't be any paperwork to confirm your passes.

I am so sorry - it has been a  monumental mess-up by the RHS Exams Department. 

On top of that, the release date for the June exam results is now in the first week of September....

Janet