It sounds like plans to scrap GCSE exams and switch to courses modelled on European Baccalaureates have been scrapped. I think this is good news for a number of reasons. Partly, because the bane of the education system (and plenty of other systems) is wholesale change. It offers a slim chance of the champions of the new system going down in history as the harbingers of significant progress, but more chance of just creating another short-lived project that brings little in the way of substantial benefit and the inevitability of all sorts of start up costs, financial and otherwise. In all honesty, it is probably also because I was in one of the first cohorts to pass through GCSEs and I feel they did alright for me.