As students return to classes, it's interesting to note that the recent stream of GCSE results show that Bermuda's students in the private and public school systems can compete with their peers in the rest of the world.

It has been difficult to make that claim in recent years because the Island's public schools all but abandoned all external exams in the wake of school restructuring in the mid-1990s.

Most of the Island's private schools continued with the UK GCSE after that time, but Government school graduates could only depend on the Bermuda School Certificate and the Terra Nova assessment tests.

Now that is changing, with both Berkeley and CedarBridge beginning to phase their students into the GCSE curriculum.

The GCSE is not a perfect exam. Unlike the BSC, it cannot cover "Bermudian subjects".

And there have been criticisms in the UK that standards have been lowered since it replaced the more demanding GCE O Level and the less rigorous Certificate of Secondary Education.

But the GCSE is a reputable and recognised exam that students can take anywhere to demonstrate that they have reached a certain level of education.

The Bermuda High School for Girls' most recent GCSE results show that Bermuda schools can compete with the best schools in the UK and elsewhere. Indeed, BHS student Madeline Gardner's English Literature paper was among the top five written anywhere ? an extraordinary achievement.

While Saltus Grammar School and Warwick Academy have not yet released their results, there's every reason to believe that they have continued to perform well.

Students taking Spanish at Berkeley also did well as they took the GCSE in that subject as well, demonstrating that the Government schools' decision to adopt the curriculum was worth it, and that success in academic exams is not limited to private schools.

As the Island's public schools embrace the GCSE more fully, Bermuda will at last have a yardstick with which to measure itself against other countries. And if the public schools are successful, it will help to restore confidence in the system and end the de facto segregation that now afflicts Bermuda's schools.

That will provide a powerful incentive to educators to see what's working and what's not and to fix the problems.

Some will argue that exams are not everything and that "teaching to the exam" will create narrow-minded school leavers. Worse, students who do poorly ? and som, will ? will suffer from low self-esteem.

All of that is true. It is also irrelevant. What's the use of high self-esteem if you can't spell or add? And what's the use of "well-rounded" graduates if they cannot move on to the next level of education because they cannot show they are qualified?

There is an irony in all of this. When the GCSE and A Level results were released in the UK, it was reported that the region that produced the best overall results was Northern Ireland.

This was striking because Northern Ireland is the only UK region to have continued with a grammar school system as opposed to a comprehensive system, which Bermuda adopted in the late 1990s.

In the rest of the UK, there is a recognition that comprehensive education is not working. Schools are being given more autonomy, some are focusing on specific areas of excellence and struggling schools are being transformed into "academies" similar to US charter schools.

All of these ideas are worth taking up in Bermuda, which suffers from too much bureaucracy and a tendency to latch onto the next great idea as a cure-all instead of focusing on the nuts and bolts of good teaching.

Having recognised standards through the GCSE is a start. But there is much more to be done.