Upcoming changes to the use of coloured adhesive labels by the Royal Mail for Special Delivery Guaranteed® and Signed For® services have resulted in significant changes for educational and awarding organisation’s.

SCD has been keeping track of these changes and helping regulated educational organisations modernise their approach to dispatch and tracking.

For many organisations which are under the watchful eye of the exam regulators, the Royal Mail Special Delivery Guaranteed® and Signed For® service has played an important part in the process of tracking the dispatch of sensitive materials such as exam papers and learner certificates.

From the 1st of November, Royal Mail will be removing the use of coloured adhesive labels used for Special Delivery Guaranteed® and Royal Mail Signed For® products. Many educational organisations mailrooms use this service, manually packing materials, attaching labels, and inputting data by hand, sometimes into multiple systems.

Documents distributed by educational organisations often contain sensitive information such as question papers or personal candidate information. Therefore, care needs to be taken to ensure that the materials are tracked properly.

If this sensitive data were to fall into the wrong hands, then it could compromise the integrity of an assessment and result in expensive test paper rewrites. In some situations, such as the distribution of certificates, data breaches may need to be reported to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO).

The Royal Mail Signed For® service has been a popular choice for awarding organisations and educational institutions for certificate distribution but falls short of providing a detailed audit trail and can often be a resource-intensive process that is prone to human error. For instance, Royal Mail Signed For® only provides signed-for upon delivery; this often doesn’t provide enough information to resolve problems relating to distribution properly.

“We’ve been watching this development for some time now and engaging with customers to understand the impact and the opportunity for modernisation in the educational sector. We believe we have the perfect solution which integrates neatly with educational organisations existing processes.”
Mark Jones - Executive Chair, SCD

Many educational organisations have taken the opportunity to modernise their mailing process due to the incoming changes, including switching to an easy-to-use automated service provided by Secure and Confidential Documents (SCD). This fully tracked service provides regular updates and can be monitored by customers directly.

SCD’s remote mailing bureau removes the need for the manual handling and dispatching of sensitive materials. Data for distribution, such as certificates and exam papers, can be securely transmitted to SCD for printing, efficient packaging to save distribution costs, and secure trackable dispatch, often within the same day of data receipt.

The SCD pack and tracking portal provides educational organisations with a detailed view of their materials, reporting on each stage of the document’s journey to its destination.

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