Latest / Dr Justin Coulson's Happy Families / #1130 - Should Your Child Repeat a Year?

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#1130 - Should Your Child Repeat a Year? · Dr Justin Coulson's Happy Families

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  Speaker 1: It's their Happy Families podcast.
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  Speaker 2: It's the podcast for the time poor parent who just
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  Speaker 2: wants answers.
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  Speaker 3: Now, the school year is almost over, report cards on
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  Speaker 3: their way into hands, mail boxes and inboxes, email boxes
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  Speaker 3: all over the place, and this is that time of
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  Speaker 3: the year where some families start to have a conversation
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  Speaker 3: around how's our child doing and are they doing okay?
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  Speaker 1: Or more to the point, we know they're not doing okay.
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  Speaker 1: There's some pretty serious gaps in their knowledge. Should they
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  Speaker 1: repeat a year? Sometimes it's not their fault. Sometimes there's
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  Speaker 1: inconsistency with the school they start in your school, there's
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  Speaker 1: challenges teachers and so on, maybe serious illness. But in
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  Speaker 1: other cases we just look at how child's fairing and think,
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  Speaker 1: oh my goodness, they did not master the material this year.
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  Speaker 1: Do you think they should repeat? What should we do
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  Speaker 1: about it? Kylie? That's our topic today on the Happy
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  Speaker 1: Families Podcast.
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  Speaker 2: I'm really surprised we're having this conversation. As far as
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  Speaker 2: I was aware, repeating is just number one. It's not
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  Speaker 2: something that the Education Department would encourage in any way,
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  Speaker 2: shape or form, And I just I feel like it's
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  Speaker 2: not a conversation these days.
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  Speaker 1: You might be surprised. We don't have a whole lot
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  Speaker 1: of really great data in Australia. There's not a lot
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  Speaker 1: of well kept publicized research on this. But the last
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  Speaker 1: start of that I've got is ten years old, and
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  Speaker 1: that's from twenty fourteen. In that research, about seven and
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  Speaker 1: a half percent of fifteen year olds had repeated one
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  Speaker 1: year over the course of their schooling, So whether they
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  Speaker 1: repeat a grade one or grade three or grade eight, whatever,
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  Speaker 1: it was just under ten percent. Seven and a half
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  Speaker 1: percent of fifteen year olds had repeated one year, which
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  Speaker 1: was down slightly from eight percent in two thousand and nine.
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  Speaker 1: So seven and a half eight percent of kids are
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  Speaker 1: repeating at some point. And one of our daughters has
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  Speaker 1: we got hurt, although it wasn't really repeating a year
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  Speaker 1: of school. We just got her to do that preschool
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  Speaker 1: year a second time because we wanted her to be
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  Speaker 1: a bit older. So I guess that doesn't doesn't quite
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  Speaker 1: count well.
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  Speaker 2: I kind of think the conversation would be more useful
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  Speaker 2: in do we delay starting our kids schooling journey as
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  Speaker 2: opposed to putting them in at the appointed time and
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  Speaker 2: then recognizing that there's too many gaps in their learning
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  Speaker 2: and doing it again.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, so that's called red shirting, and research certainly indicates
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  Speaker 1: that overwhelmingly that's what most parents are doing now. They're
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  Speaker 1: just saying, want my child to grow up a bit more.
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  Speaker 1: I want them to be a bit older, let's start
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  Speaker 1: school an extra year down the track, and that's what
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  Speaker 1: the push is. Interestingly, around the world there's a really
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  Speaker 1: big shift or there are lots of differences in various countries.
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  Speaker 1: So for example, in France and Spain and Portugal, it's
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  Speaker 1: really quite common for kids to be retained free. It's
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  Speaker 1: called grade retention or repeating year, that is, doing the
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  Speaker 1: academic year over again. Places like Australia, the UK, the US,
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  Speaker 1: New Zealand doesn't happen very often at all, under ten percent,
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  Speaker 1: seven eight percent, that sort of thing. And places like Denmark, Iceland, Finland, Norway, Sweden,
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  Speaker 1: those Nordic countries, the Northern European countries pretty much never happens.
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  Speaker 1: It's not part of the conversation. It's simply not what
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  Speaker 1: they do. They focus more on, Okay, this child struggling,
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  Speaker 1: individualized teaching, student learning plans, student differentiation, that kind of thing.
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  Speaker 1: So I find it really fascinating just the different way
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  Speaker 1: that this plays out around the world. But Australia, I mean,
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  Speaker 1: nearly ten percent of kids will repeat a grade at
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  Speaker 1: some point in that first fifteen years of life.
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  Speaker 2: So why do people think repeating is a good idea?
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  Speaker 1: There are three main reasons that come up from all
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  Speaker 1: the research that I've looked at. The first one is
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  Speaker 1: just this idea that maturation, That is, the building blocks
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  Speaker 1: weren't quite there, but as you mature, you're more cognitively mature,
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  Speaker 1: you're better able to regulate your emotions and your behaviors,
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  Speaker 1: You've more socially mature, so you're probably and you're going
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  Speaker 1: to have the cognitive architecture to learn the stuff you
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  Speaker 1: need to learn this year because you didn't do it
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  Speaker 1: last year. So the whole putting the building blocks in place,
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  Speaker 1: that's the idea. Unfortunately, unfortunately the research doesn't necessarily support that,
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  Speaker 1: and that is a lot of kids will feel incompetent
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  Speaker 1: because we've asked them to repeat a year, and they'll
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  Speaker 1: also be quite bored because there might be a few
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  Speaker 1: areas where they are failing, where they're really struggling, whe
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  Speaker 1: they're not up to standard, but they've kind of got
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  Speaker 1: their head around most of it anyway. So they show
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  Speaker 1: up at the first part of the new year and
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  Speaker 1: the first three, four, five, maybe six months are just
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  Speaker 1: dead set boring for them because they were mostly okay.
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  Speaker 1: And this is making sense because they're a year older
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  Speaker 1: and they actually feel worse, not better. It doesn't help them.
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  Speaker 2: I think this is where individualized teaching is so important,
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  Speaker 2: and making sure that your children's school has the capacity
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  Speaker 2: to cope with the differences in learning.
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  Speaker 1: And so the differences in learning is the second reason
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  Speaker 1: that people promote it that there's a term that you
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  Speaker 1: might hear of now and again called heterogeneity. In other words,
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  Speaker 1: if there's enormous heterogeneity in the group, you've got a
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  Speaker 1: lot of variation. You've got the really you're smart kids
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  Speaker 1: that are learning everything and the kids that are lagging
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  Speaker 1: and really struggling. And the argument is by getting kids
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  Speaker 1: to repeat, you create more homogeneity in the group. That is,
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  Speaker 1: everyone's a lot more aligned similar levels, and the more
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  Speaker 1: homogenize the group, the easy they are to teach. So
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  Speaker 1: by asking a child to repeat, by retaining the grade,
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  Speaker 1: what you're effectively doing is you're letting all the kids
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  Speaker 1: who are at the same level move up. But you're
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  Speaker 1: asking the kids who aren't to stay back. That's the argument.
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  Speaker 1: And then of course there's just the competency argument, like
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  Speaker 1: if you're competent, you're going to feel better about yourself,
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  Speaker 1: your self esteems going to be higher, it's going to
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  Speaker 1: be a refresher rather than new material, You're going to
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  Speaker 1: be more experienced, you do well. Some arguments for grade
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  Speaker 1: retention as well is that the threat, the threat of
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  Speaker 1: retention can actually be the motivated to get kids to
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  Speaker 1: continue and work hard, which I think is a pretty
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  Speaker 1: unhelpful approach, but they're the main reasons that people would
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  Speaker 1: argue that grade retention is a good idea.
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  Speaker 2: So I know from our personal experienced. We have two
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  Speaker 2: children who were born in April. We lived in New
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  Speaker 2: South Wales, and so they were able to start school
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  Speaker 2: as four year olds turning five in the April, and
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  Speaker 2: in both cases completely competent children, very articulate, very capable
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  Speaker 2: of learning the material. But what we noticed with our
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  Speaker 2: older daughter was that it didn't really start to matter
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  Speaker 2: until about grade three. Then we started to see some
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  Speaker 2: gaps in her social capacity and emotional regulation because she
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  Speaker 2: was so much younger than her peers and so as
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  Speaker 2: a result. That meant that with our youngest, we decided
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  Speaker 2: we would do the opposite to that, and we gave
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  Speaker 2: her an extra year in preschool. I was really concerned
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  Speaker 2: about that at the time. It was a really hard decision.
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  Speaker 2: I felt like I was doing bad by her. But
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  Speaker 2: my one concern was is she going to be bored?
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  Speaker 2: Is she going to come next year doing the same things,
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  Speaker 2: And just we've wasted a whole year of learning and
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  Speaker 2: growth for her. And I was so grateful for a
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  Speaker 2: school structure that just said, no, of course, not. Whatever
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  Speaker 2: she's ready for, we're going to give her. And so
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  Speaker 2: the following year, while all of her friends were still
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  Speaker 2: learning their letters, she was actually writing and she wrote
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  Speaker 2: her own story that year, completely written from start to finish,
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  Speaker 2: illustrated and put together. And it was such a beautiful
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  Speaker 2: experience watching her in the same environment, but stretched and extended.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, so advantage there really for red shirting the idea
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  Speaker 1: of holding the kids in their childhood for an extra
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  Speaker 1: year before they head off to school, giving them that
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  Speaker 1: opportunity to mature. Unfortunately, it seems that great retention doesn't
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  Speaker 1: provide the same advantages as what you've just described. By
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  Speaker 1: waiting till the kids rolled before they start school. So
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  Speaker 1: looking at the research, there's a research paper that came
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  Speaker 1: out in twenty twenty I think it was maybe it
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  Speaker 1: was twenty twenty one, and it's called Effectiveness of aid
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  Speaker 1: retention A systematic reviewer meta analysis eighty four methodologically sound
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  Speaker 1: studies from two thousand to twenty nineteen from around the world,
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  Speaker 1: looking really carefully at this one major thing, and here's
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  Speaker 1: what they found in the data. They found the disadvantages.
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  Speaker 1: Repeaters are not universally incompetent, and so learning outcomes end
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  Speaker 1: up being lower rather than higher because they get bored,
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  Speaker 1: they get frustrated, and they start to feel like that, well,
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  Speaker 1: they're internalizing this idea that I'm a dummy, that's why
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  Speaker 1: I had to stay back. There are social consequences. The
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  Speaker 1: major social consequences consist of two things. Number One, the
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  Speaker 1: kids who left you behind are no longer part of
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  Speaker 1: your social group, So all those friendships that you've had
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  Speaker 1: several years developing and strengthening and creating those foundations are
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  Speaker 1: no longer there. And number two, it seems that the
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  Speaker 1: younger kids actually pick on the kids that have been retained,
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  Speaker 1: the kids that are repeating are at much greater risk
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  Speaker 1: of being picked on by their new peers who are saying, oh,
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  Speaker 1: look at you, you're not smart like us. You've had
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  Speaker 1: to stay back with us. Where the babies, but you're
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  Speaker 1: the actual baby, which is just kids again, the casual
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  Speaker 1: brutality that you see in kids, and that of course
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  Speaker 1: is associated with a decrease in self esteem. And the
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  Speaker 1: research has found that there's a decreased pleasure in learning.
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  Speaker 1: Learning is no longer seen as something that you innately
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  Speaker 1: do or something that you can derive pleasure from. It's
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  Speaker 1: something that you have to do to avoid the awfulness
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  Speaker 1: of looking like a dummy. And that's obviously not going
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  Speaker 1: to be great. And the last couple of things they highlighted.
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  Speaker 1: Number one, it causes stress and anxiety for the kids
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  Speaker 1: who are being retained for that year. And it's also
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  Speaker 1: terrible from a cost point of view, like the government
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  Speaker 1: or the family or whoever's footing the bill, it ends
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  Speaker 1: up costing a lot, so they're on the disadvantages to
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  Speaker 1: retaining kids. It seems like if you're thinking about repeating,
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  Speaker 1: the evidence is firmly against it.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, I know. When I moved over from New Zealand,
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  Speaker 2: I had finished five years of schooling. So when we
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  Speaker 2: moved over at the end of my fifth year of school,
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  Speaker 2: in my mind, I should be going into year six.
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  Speaker 2: But I was actually again like our April babies, I
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  Speaker 2: was at the younger end of the scale. But I
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  Speaker 2: chucked such a mental tantrum with my parents and the
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  Speaker 2: principal that they decided that they would put me into
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  Speaker 2: year six. Having gone through that process, now, I would
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  Speaker 2: one hundred percent have said they did wrong by me,
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  Speaker 2: as the two adults in the room who know better,
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  Speaker 2: they did wrong by me. I needed to be in
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  Speaker 2: year five because there was so many gaps in my learning.
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  Speaker 1: What he's saying, you could have been a lawyer, or
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  Speaker 1: an engineer or a doctor instead.
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  Speaker 2: No, not at all, just my level of competence. I
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  Speaker 2: spent the rest of my high school years feeling completely
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  Speaker 2: incompetent because I never felt like I caught up. I
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  Speaker 2: was never at the same stage as my peers.
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  Speaker 1: It's so important get the kids into school at the
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  Speaker 1: right time and then just let the system do what
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  Speaker 1: it's supposed to do from an education point of view.
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  Speaker 1: Having said that, there will always be children who struggle.
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  Speaker 1: So I want to talk about a couple of things
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  Speaker 1: that we can do to help our children if they
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  Speaker 1: are struggling, because this really matters. There were some studies
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  Speaker 1: that showed that in countries where there was what's known
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  Speaker 1: as ability grouping or streaming to deal with heterogeneity, to
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  Speaker 1: deal with different abilities, that retention could have some advantages,
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  Speaker 1: but the size of the effect overall was essentially zero,
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  Speaker 1: and it seems that the net effect of retention or
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  Speaker 1: repeating a grade is it's better to avoid it. It's
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  Speaker 1: just really hard to make the argument that it is
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  Speaker 1: a good thing. So the other options differentiation, and that's
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  Speaker 1: really a teacher thing where teachers identify who's doing well
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  Speaker 1: and who's not. They provide additional support to the kids
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  Speaker 1: who are not doing well, which can sometimes be hard
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  Speaker 1: because the kids who are not doing well, the kids
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  Speaker 1: that you identify as struggling, can quite often be emotionally
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  Speaker 1: and behave really challenging as well, usually because they're struggling.
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  Speaker 1: So it's hard to see past that and say I'm
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  Speaker 1: here to support you in spite of the fact that
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  Speaker 1: you hate being here and you feeling competent and you're
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  Speaker 1: making life really hard for everybody. It seems to be
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  Speaker 1: a really really big impact on whether the kids will
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  Speaker 1: do well or not, so that individualized teaching. But it
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  Speaker 1: seems from everything that I've read that the best thing
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  Speaker 1: that you can do for your kids if they're struggling
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  Speaker 1: academically is to get extra tutor in support, to get
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  Speaker 1: somebody external from the school to come in and do
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  Speaker 1: a bit of help with the maths or the English
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  Speaker 1: or the French or whatever it is. And I know
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  Speaker 1: that that's sort of a privileged thing. You've got to
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  Speaker 1: have the money, you've got to be able to afford it.
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  Speaker 1: But it seems that that is it. The advantages of
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  Speaker 1: being able to stick with your friends and maintaining as
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  Speaker 1: much stability in that schooling situation, the advantages are far
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  Speaker 1: greater than any advantages that might come from allowing encouraging
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  Speaker 1: the children to repeat a year. It just seems that
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  Speaker 1: those advantages don't exist.
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  Speaker 2: So, based on everything we've talked about, doctor justin where
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  Speaker 2: are we sitting.
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  Speaker 1: Don't repeat if you can avoid it now. Now there
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  Speaker 1: will be a small percentage of kids who it really
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  Speaker 1: is the best option. But over on average, when we
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  Speaker 1: look at the results globally, the researchers in this particular
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  Speaker 1: paper said and I quote great retention provides a zero
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  Speaker 1: net effect. That is, it is not associated with the
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  Speaker 1: positive outcomes that we hope that it will be, and
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  Speaker 1: there are many many disadvantages. We're not seeing academic advantages,
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  Speaker 1: we're not seeing the attendant growth in self esteem or
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  Speaker 1: cognitive development or social development, like across the board, no
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  Speaker 1: matter what variable you look at, we're just not seeing
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  Speaker 1: the positive outcomes. With a handful of small exceptions that
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  Speaker 1: are too small and too context dependent to talk about here.
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  Speaker 1: In an Australian context, it seems like finding alternatives and
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  Speaker 1: investing in additional extracurricular educational support tends to be the
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  Speaker 1: better outcome. Hold them back, yeah, yeah, give them an
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  Speaker 1: extra year of childhood.
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  Speaker 2: And let them mature, let them start too early.
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  Speaker 1: That's that's a really big one. In fact, I'm so
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  Speaker 1: glad you said that. As we move towards the end
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  Speaker 1: of the year and people get ready for next year,
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  Speaker 1: if you can give them an extra year of being
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  Speaker 1: a kid, it will be so worth it. The Happy
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: Families podcast is produced by Justin Ruland from Bridge Media.
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: To get more information about making your family happier, visit
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: happy families dot com dot au. And if you'd like
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: more information about the study that I was specifically citing,
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: check the show notes. We'll have a link to that
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: study right there.