To think the US system if repeating grades is weird?

[llamajohn]

Like you could repeat 1, 2 and 3 and be what? 12/13 in the 5th grade (peers would be 8-9) - how is that helpful to anyone?

I mean if the child doesn't know enough to pass. It's on them. How will they survive the next year?

This was very common where I grew up (not USA). If a child was struggling and not meeting academic expectations they were held back and were able to reset and close academic gaps. I never knew of a child repeating more than one year, although it may have happened. I think it is a much better idea than pushing them along and having them struggle and grow to hate school.

Used to be common in the UK too

Some might say it’s important for a child to learn the year 1 curriculum before moving on to harder stuff or they will just struggle throughout

Honestly, I think it makes sense for NT children. How can they be expected to keep moving up year after year if they are struggling. It is also an incentive to work as hard as they can year after year. It is a low bench mark to be moved up (according to an American cousin) so it is not discriminating against lower ability children.

It’s better than our system - where a child can know nothing that was supposed to have been learnt that year but move on regardless. It’s how people end up with no qualifications.

Of course it’s down to cost. We don’t want people repeating years as we’d have to foot the bill and there probably wouldn’t be a space in the year below.

I think our system does nothing to encourage kids to achieve. You can skive/mess up most of the year. But you’ll go up anyway. Bizarre.

It’s like that in a lot of countries. Repeating 1 year can be a good thing because it allows people to catch up instead of continually failing. People repeat years at sixth form all the time.

I don’t think you would be allowed to be 5 years behind though you would probably be sent to a remedial school at that point.

I don't think they do it much anymore.
If a child "fails" a grade more than once then there must be SEN and alternative educational settings might be considered so it would be very rare to have a child 2 or more years older in a grade.
However starting age and cut off dates for admission vary from state to state though so sometimes children may be in the "traditionally wrong age" grade due to moving home.

It doesn't happen repeatedly - if a child is failing each year then it would be time to look at things other than mainstream education.

Also US education standards are fairly low - the level required to graduate high school at 18 is well below A-level standard. So the progress needed to pass each year is not huge - in general kids repeating a year will often have had a disrupted year for some reason (illness, family issues etc) and so have missed quite a bit of school work.

Totally normal where I come from. Quite common to repeat 1 year, although usually it’s from year 4/5, few repeat the very first ones. Kids are used to having a handful of classmates who are a year older. It’s quite unusual to repeat 2 years, and it mostly happens towards the very end of school years.

Basically, you need a minimum of knowledge before you can progress to the next level of education. It’s 40% until the age of 16, 50% from then on. I don’t find it unreasonable at all.

Before any Americans snap about me saying graduation standards are low - yes, I know that is why Advanced Placement/Pre-College courses exist etc and there are options for more advanced study but international education studies do show that the US requirements in English and Maths for simply graduating are low compared to many other countries.

In primary school, teachers are aware of the different levels and are continually finding ways of helping dcs access the curriculum and if necessary, putting in place interventions help the lowest abilities. I can think of lots of dcs who would have 'failed' in lower years of primary school who went on to flourish in years 5 and 6. That wouldn't have happened if they had been kept behind.
In secondary schools, core subjects are streamed so teachers can give the lower ability pupils the support they need.
I know of a couple of pupils who were kept behind in primary school for academic reasons. Both ended up being put back in the right year group as it had such a detrimental impact on their confidence and didn't help them academically.

Not just the US - lots of countries do it. I was incredibly surprised coming here that people just went up a year based on age. I think it’s a terrible idea - there will be numerous children where the knowledge gap just widens and widens, causing them to become more disheartened and internalise the idea that they are just “thick”, whereas in reality if they’d spent an additional year understanding the fundamentals they would have done just fine.

it wasn’t that unusual to have one or two kids who had resat a year, but I can’t think of anyone who had done more than once.

PS in my country there are extenuating circumstances that allow kids to progress through with their age group if failing the year was due to illness, bereavement, sensitive family issues.

They’d move up and get additional support - usually over the summer - to ensure they will catch up.

The system is not designed to punish people who might have had to miss school for one reason or the other - it’s to prevent kids who couldn’t be bothered to learn anything, from achieving the same qualifications as their peers who actually put the work in.

Where I grew up it was very common but it tended to be in infants. So say your child was a summer baby (may to August). If they struggled in reception, year one or two it was very very common to just stay in that year. I knew blinked an eye. Could also happen if your child wasn't summer born but less common. Kids develop at different stages and it can really help.

In Ireland, it’s the same, you can repeat a year if necessary, although they do try to avoid it. Age is just a number, here they can start school at any age from 4 to 6 so you could have someone in your class that’s just turned four and someone that’s just turned six.

With deferring summer borns becoming more popular...
It does make me question whether we should have various points on the curriculum when suitability for the next stage is assessed. End of EYFS (Reception) and end of KS2 (Primary ) for example. Because not all 5yos are ready for Yr1, and not all 11yos are ready for Secondary school.

However itvwouod need careful management as being kept back may be a confidence destroyer in itself.

Spain is the same. I once knew a 14 year old boy in the first year of secondary with his 12 year old sister, because he simply refused to do any work and kept failing the exams.

I think the issue with doing it in this country now is that it is so unusual. In countries where it’s the norm it’s not seen as a big deal so there isn’t the same judgements around it.

Because pushing them up a year with massive educational gaps is so much better?

I also think having a wider choice up to 18 and doing the wider first year at Uni before choosing a degree is more sensible too

We lived in the US as kids for several years. My little brother was held back in 1st grade due to poor handwriting, then he later skipped 3rd grade.
So he went to 1st, 1st, 2nd, 4th

Do Uk schools still skip pupils? My mother told me was skipped a couple of times in school, (back in the 50s) when she finished her A levels she was too young for university and had to stay on an additional year in school and did some S levels.

My son was very seriously ill in reception. He missed about two months of school all in. Ideally he would have simply stayed in reception for another year. Instead he went up to year one with huge gaps and everyone has had to put extra work in with him. It knocked his confidence a lot and it's such a shame and so easily avoided. I don't understand why it has to be so rigid

Hmmm. I remember I had a teacher from Italy telling us how dcs were held back in his native country and how he thought how ludicrous he thought it was.

Well yes because graduation standards are a bare minimum. The whole system is conceived differently. It's meant to be something that the vast majority of students achieve, which is not the case for European school leaving exams.

repeating grades is frowned upon these days. It's been shown not to be effective unless the child has actually missed substantial amounts of school (for example through extended illness). If they have failed to learn, simply repeating the same thing again often doesn't work. The preference now is for targeted intervention. Some call it social promotion, and that may happen, but in many cases it turns out there were other issues. I know a child who made it to 7th grade with undiagnosed dyslexia. It turned out he was reading at something like a 1st grade level and guessing at the rest.

From what I understand, retention or "redoublement" is still fairly common in France.

I think it's a good idea. Especially GCSE years. There's a MH crisis with our young people and children of all abilities can end up out of school for a while. Being able to repeat Y10 or Y11 if things go wrong would help so many.

But our schools are mostly full to bursting and it would cost more, so kids don't have that safety net here.