Grade Retention and Automatic Promotion at Primary Level in Pakistan

Pakistan has several national and international commitments to achieve universal primary education. For achieving the target, Ministry of Education in collaboration with provincial departments has taken a number of initiatives especially at the inception of 21st century. Automatic promotion policy for primary grade students is a significant initiative taken by the government at micro level in all provinces with few amendments. Through this policy, students of first three grades at primary level in all public schools are promoted (without any assessment as well as any remedial instruction) to grade 4 at the end of academic session. But most of poor performers are retained at grade 4, because of a compulsory departmental examination at the end of grade 5. Greater probability of failure of these poor performers in final departmental examination affect negatively the school position. But, nobody is concerned about these repeaters that what happens to them in class rooms throughout the "repeated year". This mixed method study found that first experience of failure affect badly the self-esteem of the repeaters besides a little improvement in their academic performance.