Revised Recognised Centre Handbook (RCH)

1st4sport will be introducing a revised Recognised Centre Handbook in October 2007. The new Handbook aims to provide organisations that have been recognised to deliver one or more of our qualifications with information on a variety of areas that impact on administration, management, delivery, assessment and/or quality assurance when providing our qualifications. Information in the new Handbook is generic to all our centres and all of our qualifications and includes:

• our mission statement and values
• customer-service information:
• revised complaints procedures
• revised appeals procedures
• requirements for recognised centres
• Quality-assurance procedures
• external verification
• sanctions
• investigations
• procedures for dealing with malpractice
• procedures for dealing with child/vulnerable adult abuse
• access arrangements.

A CD-ROM containing all the new electronic forms required to be used to adhere to the revised procedures will accompany the Recognised Centre Handbook. If you are a recognised centre for more than one of our qualifications, procedures may differ, depending on the requirements of the particular qualification. To cater for such variations, we provide specific tools (eg qualification-specific information and administration guidance per qualification) that will serve as an addendum to the generic Handbook. We appreciate that our centres may operate with different awarding bodies in different ways and sometimes employ a large number of people to deliver a range of our qualifications. To assist in reducing bureaucracy where we can, we try to ensure that our requirements and procedures are consistent across qualifications.

One critical expectation we have of our recognised centres is that you have systems in place to ensure that everybody involved in the provision of our qualifications is updated on a regular basis about any changes to our generic and/or qualification-specific requirements or processes.