Grade repetition, a declining practice with effects that are hard to isolate

Repeating a year was long a striking feature of the French school system, with high rates compared with similar OECD countries. Its frequency has fallen sharply over the decades, both in primary school and in the collège, the French lower secondary school.

This decline came about gradually, through successive texts and through changes in the practices of class councils, the end-of-term staff meetings that decide on progression, well before the subject became the object of highly visible regulatory decisions.

A 2014 decree made grade repetition exceptional, reserving it notably for situations where learning had broken down. A 2018 decree reopened the possibility of using it, still on an exceptional basis, after discussion with the family and accompanied by a teaching support plan.

These back-and-forth moves concern the leeway given to school teams more than the actual frequency, which remained low in both cases. They reflect a persistent disagreement about what the measure achieves.

Simply comparing pupils who repeat a year with those who move up to the next class tells us almost nothing. The former were selected precisely because their results were weaker, and they differ on many other dimensions.

The most solid studies exploit promotion rules based on a cut-off score on a test. Pupils just above and just below the threshold are comparable, and only the retention decision separates them.

Another approach compares schools or countries with different practices. It runs into the same obstacle in another form: systems with high repetition rates also differ in their curricula, their organisation and the make-up of their pupil population.

Studies of this kind conducted in the United States, notably in Chicago and Florida, often find a short-term gain in results among retained pupils, which tends to fade in the following years.

The effects on continuing in education and on dropping out are more disputed, and vary with the age at which retention occurs and with the teaching support surrounding it. These American schemes differ markedly from French grade repetition, which limits how far the results can be transposed.

Advocates of wider use point to the heterogeneity of classes and the difficulty of following a curriculum without the earlier groundwork. Its opponents point to the cost of an extra year, the effect on the pupil's relative age and the absence of any demonstrated lasting benefit.

Both positions rest on real data, but neither can draw on a French evaluation meeting the standards of threshold studies, since there is no promotion rule based on a single test.

The debate also concerns what is being compared. A repeated year can be set against moving up without any particular help or moving up with specific support, and the conclusion depends largely on the alternative chosen.