What do you mean when you say that 'will it bring about changes needed to make education more valuable'? It has been introduced to give students with better abilities a chance to distinguish themselves, and obviously it's a statistical tool for universities to pick out the more hardworking or intelligent candidates. And the fact that a student with 3 A*s has been rejected is irrelevant. When unis ask for an unique grade combination, that's what they need. Say for example you have four subjects, and to get the conditional offer you are asked to get A*AA with the A* in maths, it means THAT is what the universities want. You WILL usually be rejected if you don't fulfill the A* condition for maths, even if you get 3 A*s in the other subjects. And this has happened to a friend of mine who applied and got an offer from Cambridge to read economics.