@Tom - BCS is ICT & Business combined.

In my school, Year 11 and below are allocated two hours for General P.E (Games). Last year, as I regularly had an excuse for not being able to take part in the lesson, my school asked for parental consent for me to sit out of the lesson completely and work on the Media Studies (Dual Award), so as to allow me to gain an additional GCSE compared to my fellow classmates.

This two-hour period of Media Studies was unsupervised and was held in the ICT room. At the time, a lesson of Year 10 BCS took place. It was the first year my school offered BCS, and I have to say it appeared to work well. For GCSEs, there are no 'option blocks' in my school and everyone can take exactly what they like, but this posed a problem last year when the Year 10s were choosing their GCSEs, as their year group consists of around 30 students (highly unusual of my school - when most year groups consist of 10-20). This posed a challenge to our Director of Studies at the time, and he had no other option but to offer BCS as the alternative, as there was no way all 30 students could take ICT, Business Studies and their other eight chosen subjects.

As I was taking both ICT and Business Studies separately, I was able to compare the two. Whilst I personally would have hated to take them separately opposed to combined (given that it would have meant me taking Art, D.T, H.E/Food & Nutrition, P.E or R.E), it has worked very well for students in my school who form part of a year group with more diverse 'subject tastes'. It did appear to be a lot more interesting than both the separated subjects, though.