STUDENTS futures are on hold and at least one teenager fears he has missed his place at college because examination results have not arrived six weeks after they were due.

Exam boards and the affected Medway schools are blaming each other for the results fiasco, which affects school leavers who have still not received their GNVQ vocational results. These results should have been out on August 20. Cllr Pat Wozencroft, Medway Council's cabinet member for education, described the situation as "absolutely appalling".

Ian Ellis, 17, of Gravesend Road, Strood, took GNVQ exams in IT, English and maths at Temple School, Strood. He had hoped to take an advanced computing course at college this autumn but now fears he will not be able to get in because he has no qualifications to show.

He said: "Out of my circle of friends there are about 12 of us affected. Our future has been put totally on hold. We have no idea whether we have passed or failed."

Another school affected by the delays is Howard School, Rainham.

Stevie Pattison-Dick, media manager at Edexcell, which is responsible for some of the exam results, said the problem at Temple School was that some work had been received and marked but the students had not been entered for the exam. She said that the results had been sent to the Howard School on time and they had since been sent again.

"It is our priority to get the mark to the student and we are making every effort to achieve this," she stressed.

George Turnbull at exam board Assessments and Qualifications Alliance said of Temple: "The school entered the pupils for the full GCSE course and then re-entered the students for the short course without informing the exam board. This led to students turning up for the exams and not being registered. And some of the course work is missing from the Howard School. We are working with the schools to try to get to the bottom of this."

Cllr Pat Wozencroft said it was appalling if young people's futures were affected. In both cases I believe the papers went missing at the exam board. They were IT papers.

"As soon as the schools were aware of the problem I understand they did everything they could to help the affected students go on to the courses they had chosen or jobs they had been offered, providing references where necessary."