It’s easy to spot the student who is repeating a year. There they are, towering above their younger classmates as they work through lessons they have already sat in before. To many young people, the prospect of being held back in school after failing to meet the required academic standard the first time around might sound like a fate worse than death.

Yet this is common practice in many countries around the world - an average of 13 per cent of 15-year-olds across Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries reported, in 2009, that they had repeated a grade at least once.

Countries that embrace grade repetition - or grade retention, as it is usually called by researchers - include Macau-China, Tunisia, Brazil, Uruguay, France, Spain and Portugal, although France reconsidered its widely used redoublement in 2015, making the practice possible only in “exceptional” circumstances.

Currently, grade repetition is rarely used as an educational intervention in the UK. But the Covid crisis has led many to question if we should consider the approach after all.

Think tank the Education Policy Institute (EPI) recently called for young people to be given a right to repeat the past year in extreme cases of learning loss. Parental polls have also indicated support for repeating a year and the former Ofsted chief Sir Michael Wilshaw has said there is an argument for it.

But how much evidence is there that grade retention is a realistic option to help children catch up? Should we be entertaining the prospect or dismissing it outright?

In more usual times, it would be easy to understand why the practice does not currently carry much weight in the UK. A solid body of evidence - much of it carried out by psychologists and economists - suggests that, in its crudest form, grade retention does not help improve a child’s chances of academic success and can actually be harmful.

Research suggests that pupils held back make, on average, four months’ less academic progress over the course of a year than those promoted to the year above. Negative effects are greatest for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, from ethnic minorities and if they are summer born.

Covid catch-up: Should school students repeat a year?

In a 2002 research analysis, several of the studies reviewed reported that grade retention was found to be the strongest predictor of students dropping out of school.

Alarmingly, John Hattie’s Visible Learning analysis of the effectiveness of educational interventions on student achievement found that not only did grade retention have a negative effect but it scored only marginally better than “corporal punishment in the home”.

An OECD report from 2011 also confirmed that countries that practised grade repetition or transferred struggling students to other schools didn’t get better results than those who did not and, in some cases, the practice reinforced socioeconomic inequities.

It is for these reasons that there are persistent calls from researchers, particularly in the US, to reduce the use of grade retention. Around three million children have repeated one or more grades since starting kindergarten in the country, owing to 16 states running policies which often do not allow pupils to progress from third grade if their reading is not up to scratch.

But organisations such as the National Association of School Psychologists, in the US, argue against grade retention in favour of schools offering a multi-pronged approach to academic support.

‘A lot of stigma’

Franci Crepeau-Hobson, associate professor at the school of psychology at the University of Colorado, Denver, highlights concerns around the psychological impact of grade retention. “Here, there is a lot of stigma associated with it because it means you failed, you flunked,” she says. “We do know, particularly when kids find out just before the retention year, we see a drop in academic self-concept and learning motivation, and that can bleed out to other areas and that can certainly impact kids socially.

“When [schools] have conversations around ‘shall we retain a particular child?’ they really need to think about the whole child. If you have someone who’s already on the bigger side physically, what does that mean? How are they going to fare socially if you have this giant second grader?”

Crepeau-Hobson also highlights concerns around how decisions over grade repetition can be in the hands of too few people, who are usually under huge financial and accountability pressures. “The school principals have a lot of power in terms of making these decisions… They are in the hotseat with kids who are not meeting standards and not passing tests, and that reflects on them. That’s how our system is built and that’s unfortunate,” she says.

Taking all of this into account, the debate is beginning to seem clear-cut. Grade retention comes with serious psychological and social costs for young people and does not appear to improve attainment. Why, then, do some countries continue the practice? And why all the calls to look again at the idea as schools help students to recover from the pandemic?

Well, despite much of the negativity, there is some research that has come up with positive findings relating to grade retention and its motivational effects.

A survey of student perceptions of grade retention in France in 2015 found that the majority regarded the practice as a “second chance” but also saw its existence as a deterrent, motivating them to work harder to avoid being held back.

More support comes from Martin West, professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who believes that grade retention is unfairly vilified. If done in the right way, at the right time, it can have benefits, he suggests.

West conducted research comparing the educational progress of third graders in Florida who narrowly failed to pass reading tests and were held back, and third graders who narrowly passed and were promoted to the next year group. “Retention has a spotty reputation for supporting students’ progress but we found that students who were held back made much faster progress than their promoted peers in the initial grades after being retained,” he says.

The size of that advantage “diminished over time” but students who were retained continued to outperform their promoted peers when they entered high school, where they went on to need “less remedial coursework” and to earn “somewhat higher grades”.

And while they were no more likely to complete high school, they were also no more likely to drop out. “So, certainly, what we found was not a slam dunk saying that the policy accomplished its goals, especially given the costs of providing students with an additional year of instruction. But, certainly, the consequences were not as negative as many critics had predicted,” West adds.

Importantly, the students who were retained were offered summer reading programmes, an individualised plan for building reading skills and they were assigned to a different teacher, who was designated “high performing” - all of which suggests that grade retention can be successful when it is part of a broader package of support.

West goes on to explain that he thinks there is “serious reason to question” much of the existing research comparing the outcomes of students who had been retained and promoted because it was uncertain whether the child’s academic outcomes were caused by repeating a grade or other vulnerabilities, such as poverty or mental illness.

His own method of comparing only children who had narrowly passed and narrowly failed their grade 3 reading test made the students more comparable, he believes.

“Students are held back for a reason and it may be that reason that explains why their long-run outcomes tend to be poor rather than the effect of retention per se,” he says.

West therefore says it is “a mistake to take retention off the table altogether”.

However, Crepeau-Hobson and many other academics are still calling for more focus on alternatives to grade retention. Early universal screening and monitoring of all children, followed by targeted interventions, would allow problems to be properly addressed, she says. “We’re providing [students who get held back] with the same instruction and content that didn’t work last year and it’s kind of crazy to think it’s going to work this time. Let’s go back to this individual kid and figure out why that kid didn’t benefit from the instruction that the vast majority of kids did.”

A slower rate of progress could be down to anything from inappropriate teaching to mental health problems, a family issue or simply a slower rate of learning, she says.

It’s therefore important to consider what problem we are trying to solve through grade retention. This is something we need to bear in mind when we consider our approaches to Covid catch up.

In reality, not every child needs to reach the same standards or go to college, Crepeau-Hobson points out. Instead, it is more important for us to help students to reach a point where they can be “contributing, happy members of society”.

Irena Barker is a freelance journalist

This article originally appeared in the 25 June 2021 issue under the headline “Tes focus on...Repeating a year”