Keeping school kids back a year – good or bad?

“I wasn’t expecting it,” says Fabian, a 16-year-old secondary school student from Amsterdam. He still sounds rather surprised. “I really thought I’d go up to the fifth year. At the last minute, I was kept back – a shame.” Fabian is having to do his fourth year all over again.
Annually, around five percent of Dutch secondary school students are kept back to do a year again. The CNV trade union says this should stop. CNV chair Michel Rog says it demotivates students. Usually, they only have low marks for a few subjects but still have to do everything again. He says that’s how to stop students developing.
Summer school
The union believes weak students should get extra help with their homework and should be able to go to summer schools where they could work on their weak points. The union argues that the measures would also provide more work for teachers.
The idea of summer school is new to the Netherlands, but there have already been positive results from trials in Amsterdam and Rotterdam where students were given extra lessons during the summer holidays. The union says the measure is aimed at children whose parents are not well-educated; youngsters who often just hang around in the summer and could benefit greatly from the extra help.
Re-doing a year
Most Dutch people don’t think having to re-do a year is a bad thing. Although Fabian and his parents were disappointed by the school's decision, he says many grown-ups said things like: “It’s not so bad. What’s a year, after all?”
Shame
A quick round-up of the views from RNW’s foreign-language departments provides a very different picture, however.
In China, being kept back a year would rarely be viewed with such indulgence. “A Chinese youngster would be really ashamed of being kept down a year,” explains RNW’s Ying Chang. “They’d have the idea that they hadn’t done their best.” Everything suggested by the CNV – extra lessons, summer school – is already quite normal in China. “Children don’t like it all, but it’s just accepted. Chinese kids don’t have much free time,” explains Chang.
Playful
In the Netherlands, teachers often suggest to parents that their children should be kept back a year - especially in primary school - even when their results have been good. The reason given is that the child is still rather playful and to stay down a year would be better for him or her. Chang: “That would be inconceivable in China.”
The reaction is much the same in Latin America. Fernando Cabrera, from Bolivia, says: “One of the reasons parents are often angry if a child fails a school year is that re-doing the year is an extra expense for the family budget.”
Cor Doeswijk from Argentina says that Latin American parents think it’s very important that their children do well in their studies even if they themselves are not well-educated. This is not as much the case in the Netherlands.
Stupid
Mohammed Abdulrahman and Abir Sarras from RNW’s Arabic department point out that it’s the parents who are blamed in the Arab World if their children are kept back a year. “If your child has to repeat a year, you have the feeling that you’ve haven’t done your best as a parent,” explains Abdulrahman. Sarras describes it as a stigma. She says that you're considered stupid if you’re 18 and have not done your final school exams yet. It’s not a subject that’s easy to talk about.
The CNV union wants the education ministry to earmark money for a trial of the alternatives to keeping children back a year. The measures, it argues, will actually reduce spending on education in the long term. It reckons the annual cost of pupils being kept back a year is 350 million euros.
And Fabian? He’s working hard and is getting great marks. He no longer finds it a bad thing that he had to repeat a year.
(mw/ae)