Social promotion

Social promotion is the practice of promoting schoolchildren to the next grade, to keep them with their peers, regardless of whether they are capable of doing grade-level work.

Some advocates of social promotion argue that keeping children together by age (together with their age cohort) is an intrinsically important factor, and that being "kept back" would be inexcusably painful for a child emotionally. Opponents of social promotion argue that it cheats the child of an education and can hide teacher ineptitude.