Held back, pushed forward?
Anastasia De Waal, 23 October 2009
Keeping primary school pupils ‘back’ if they have not reached the expected standard is a highly contentious policy. Whilst it is a fairly common practice in some European countries (including France and Germany), in others it is considered to be the height of child cruelty.
The potential trauma of a combination of losing your friends, and the argued loss of dignity by being kept back, has led to the rejection of holding pupils down by a great number of British educationalists.
Ultimately – dispassionately – however, the central questions are whether keeping pupils back at primary level has the desired effect on their eventual achievement and, if so, whether ‘pushing’ pupils who are behind into secondary school is more or less cruel?
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, has long been an advocate of holding back and a vociferous critic of what he refers to as ‘social promotion’ – advancing children into the next academic year on the basis of their age rather than their academic level. Such an advocate that Bloomberg pushed through highly unpopular legislation to enable keeping pupils in the final year of elementary school back for a year, in 2004. To prove his point (in retrospect) Bloomberg also commissioned the research foundation RAND to undertake a $3.3 million evaluation of the impact of doing so.
The results of the evaluation have just been released and Bloomberg feels vindicated. The New York Times reported that the ‘long-awaited’ findings of the RAND study showed that:
‘… students who were kept in the fifth grade [10/11 yr olds] for an additional year showed significant improvement in standardized tests over the next three years compared with low-performing students before the policy went into effect’.
In this country, keeping pupils down is a subject former chief inspector Chris Woodhead has waded in on, and a policy which the Tories flirted with in 2007. Woodhead’s support in particular added to the notion of keeping primary pupils down as being a ‘tough’ policy. Yet is keeping pupils down something which should be considered in this country for ‘compassionate’ rather than draconian reasons? It is definitely significant that it is a policy practised in the Netherlands, a country repeatedly applauded for its emphasis on and positive outcomes for child welfare.
From a teacher’s perspective the notion of alienating a pupil from their peers is deeply worrying and a primary reservation in relation to keeping pupils down. However, if Bloomberg’s evidence is anything to go by then it may be a choice between an earlier, less traumatic level of alienation and a later irrevocable alienation. If failing pupils gain sufficient ground by being held back a year at the end of primary to ultimately catch-up, is it not in fact far crueler to let a child continue indefinitely at a disadvantage? On top of the better resilience of younger children to adjust to a potentially difficult situation, the negative of not being able to access the curriculum at secondary school would arguably overshadow the difficulties of being kept down a year. A case, in other words, of identifying the lesser ‘evil’.
In the UK the achievement gap between the ‘haves and have nots’ continues to be in a state of crisis. Giving children who have less home-life advantage more opportunity to even the playing field may go a long way to ultimately narrow this gap. It may not – but given the existing evidence on the impact of keeping pupils back it is certainly a policy which should be seriously and carefully evaluated.
While it seems cruel to the child, being left behind can be the best thing for that child in the long run. The initial anxiety of losing their friends can cause stress and negative effects, but that can’t compare to the long term effects of advancing year after year and not possessing the proper skills, or knowledge on the material. That will serve to isolate and depress a teen further, because they are constantly struggling, trying to keep up, trying to stay afloat. By staying back one year, they can be taught and educated properly, should they need more assistance or a different learning technique. Within that time frame, if they improve, they might be able to make up for that lost time eventually, and on their way to being healthier and happier as a person.
There is another side to this – the question of keeping children within their age-range, even when their abilities are considerably beyond it.
I taught myself to read before starting school, at the usual age of five. So far from proving any sort of advantage, I found myself trapped in classes with pupils below my reading age, having to “move” at the speed of the slowest, bored and frustrated, “alienated”, to coin a phrase.
I have been a member of Mensa for some years, and, partly as a consequence of that, and partly through more general research, I am aware of a great many similar cases, past and present.
Given that many teachers are hostile to any sort of streaming, and that there is renewed talk of increasing the school entry age to six, this problem is likely to worsen.
Perhaps, having made it clear that ability is more important than age in one “direction” we may be able to convince people that the same applies in the other.
What is sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander.
The real challenge would be to clearly differentiate between ‘keeping pupils back’ and setting by ability; the former is, potentially, easier for many to deal with than the latter, chiefly because it has age, as opposed to ability, as its determinant.
Sure, not always, but in most primary schools the overwhelming majority of pupils who struggle and should be kept down are boys born between April and September. The gender aspect is crucial here, nothwithstanding the whole ‘summer baby’ syndrome.
I’ve not had time to read the reports referred to above, but have they taken boy/girl issues into consideration, or even ethnicity issues, as I suspect that most boys of a chinese/asian extraction do not need to be kept down as frequently compared to, say, white boys from disadvantaged communities.