The abolition of the Automatic Promotion practice has already been announced by the Ministry of Education. This article, adopting a critical mindset, evaluates the possible justifications for the same. Setting Cambridge Dictionary’s definition of ‘promotion’ – “the act of raising someone to a higher or more important rank” – as reference, logically, can promotion be automatic? This is a first point to ponder on.

Breaking an Omerta

A couple of chronological details about Automatic Promotion (AP) to ensure a better grasp:

On-line documentation traces Automatic Promotion (AP) as a policy decision back to 1990 under the Ministry of Education, Arts and Culture. Then after, AP is in full limelight again in the context of the Nine-Year Schooling, allowing Primary School Achievement Certificate (PSAC) failures as from 2016 to move to Grade 7 as part of the infamous Extended Programme.

April 2025, les Assises are summoned. Reportedly there has been “unanimity” among the stakeholders for repealing AP.

Observations:

That this “unanimity” has taken 35 years to gestate is surrealistic. It compels a volley of interrogations. Like, has there not been all the way then a presumable complicit silence about the dysfunctional householding of a matter of prime public interest? Has there then been practice of an “omerta” rhyming with the avowed existence of a “mafia institutionelle” (l’express.mu, 29.07.25) haunting the ministry? Had les Assises not been called, would not the depredations of AP have endlessly continued?

The time to practise Disruptive Politics (la Rupture) is now. Les Assises should not be a quinquennial convention anymore; its spirit needs to be kept live, revamping the whole administrative modus operandi to periodically generate feedback and/or updates of unfolding field-based projects. Every day is time to conjugate and translate the quintessence of les Assises because reform must be seen to be getting done.

The ‘Age-Denominated’ Class Hoax

AP functionally warps and corrupts appellations like class, grade and standard which are forfeited of their semantic essence, to be misrepresented as mere age-denominated groups. Grade or standard, as terminology related to school administration, refers to the respective benchmarks at which curriculum is pitched on the assumption that the prerequisite for the same has been attained, in acknowledgement of its hierarchical structure. Under AP, the whole class in all criss-cross configurations of level of performances jump to the next indiscriminately, assumed as already possessing the required competencies. A fake, the only possible commonality shared being, by default, the age factor.

Curriculum Travestied

Assessment and evaluation are integral to curriculum theory. Tests and examinations though often apprehended, tagged and hanged are indispensable not only for the purpose of setting national benchmarks for grading but also for accountability. They are part and parcel of evaluation of learning called ‘summative’ assessment due at the end of a part of the syllabus or end of academic year, which is the conventional practice enabling informed decision-taking for the way forward. Albeit debates are rife about the frequency and weighting of tests and examinations, AP is still a contraindication. It travesties the curriculum. In the process, it declutches the operative mechanisms for best returns and lulls the flywheel of schooling; it invites complacency which paves the way to underachievement. Under AP, many learners who do not master their subject-matter adequately get catapulted to a higher class, at par with flyers. A poisoned chalice! Shakespearean wisdom (Macbeth) warns: what wins you with honest trifles, buries you in deepest consequences.

Sizing up the Fallout

Summarily put, investigating a longstanding administrative dysfunction is opening a ping-pong blame game between the executive and the bureaucratic panjandrums. But in any case, AP could not have survived and stuck for so long without corrupting the system: downscaling the curricula and evening out the inter-grade levels to subvert grade laddering could have been complicit. There are forensic imprints interspersed across the educational itinerary, which in isolation run unnoticed, but put together, they tend to theorise that demarcation between grades has been abusively compromised. If confirmed by way of a meta-evaluative exercise, school would have been proven to have subsided from its presumed operational levels. Inter alia, clues hinting to the same would refer to:

1. Vocabulary and exercise levels for upper primary and lower secondary, say in English textbooks, are either undifferentiated or overlapping or jumbled up.

2. Grade 5 pupils opt to take Grade 6 PSAC papers, ‘privately’ though, and succeed.

3. Not only the PSAC questionnaire level contrasts with the level of upper primary textbooks in circulation but re-sit papers unfailingly kick up the yearly national pass percentage from the 70’s to the 80’s between November and December.

4. Grade 10 students take School Certificate (SC) examinations and pass (the number peaked during the Covid episode).

5. Grade 12 or Lower 6 students sit for Higher School Certificate examinations a year in advance and succeed, some even proclaimed laureates.

6. Obtaining a credit for SC with only 27% in Accounts, 25% in Business Studies, 22% in Add Maths, etc. (l’express, 26.02.2023) after five years of full-time study coupled with massive private tuition in a country where education is free, transport is free and examination fee is state funded.

7. With regard to the above, sceptics view the 3 credits-eligibility to do ‘Higher’ School Certificate as Artificial Promotion, a mutant of AP, an undeniable knock-on effect of the latter, deferred in time!

8. If the gross ‘disseminable’ quantitative data with regard to results warrants dire apprehension, isn’t a third-party qualitative analysiscum-meta evaluation overdue?

9. University lecturers are discomfited discovering that eligibility prerequisites met on paper not warranting the minimum level necessary to confidently plug into the courses.

10. Occasional press-reports of employers’ evaluation of novices and new recruits being categorical about the mismatch between certificate-testimony and in-situ attask predispositions – some allegedly not being able to just compose an email properly!

11. Among the 35,000 job seekers currently on the market, many primary and post-primary dropouts are unable to read, write, and innumerate, unskilled to the extent of posing a challenging difficulty for training them for manual jobs.

Strangely, the adoption of AP almost coincided in the mid 1990’s with the euthanasia, without any qualms, of a specialist body called the National Centre for Curriculum Research and Development (NCCRD); the writings on the walls today are damning.

Omnipresence of the ‘Extended Programme’ Bug

The main claim for adoption of AP at school capitalises on the affective factor of unobstructed socio-emotional growth of learners in togetherness, considering a repeat class and separation from peers as potentially psychologically traumatic. Naturally, not passing a final examination saddens everybody. But no less, promoting such a learner to the next level is iniquitous because theoretically, the difficulties to eventually befall them coping with curriculum will keep increasing as the topics and concepts sequentially grow in complexity. No surprise then that de-loading of curriculum is so often solicited from all quarters.

The infamous Extended Programme literally stretched over ten years has proved the degenerating effect of AP. The very same bug is insidiously still at work across all the grades.

Snubbing Local Research

The look-down attitude towards local research by those hubristically calling for expertise to come from foreign is simply deplorable because of being ironically abortive. The crude fact is that academic papers have since some time now sounded the alarm about the devastating effect of AP. Here is one reference: “The Ministry of Education, Culture and Human Resources avers that Automatic Promotion is a perverse practice since it has found that only 20% of the student cohort of the first grade of primary education in 1994 was able to complete the last grade of secondary education.” Ministry of Education, Culture and Human Resources (2008) (Emphasis added: “perverse practice”)

Source: Belle.L.J: A critical review of the current education system of Mauritius and the learner discipline problem in Mauritian state secondary school, Journal of Education & Social Sciences, Vol 8, Issue 1, Oct: 2017: ISSN 2289-1552

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Hosting a Contagion When AP colludes with mixed ability learning, it gets pestilential. In a mixed ability class, teaching is pitched at average level for obvious reasons. Besides, the below average and weak learners already in quicksand on account of difficulty to level up to syllabic standards, above average and potential flyers too, are entangled. Despite theoretical claims that the latter, fending through faster, will or may peer-tutor those in difficulty, in reality, they procrastinate, the class atmosphere not piquing their core interest. At the end, when all subgroups are put together, the whole class is theoretically at loss. Nobody is spared.

Bottom Line:

Five months after, as the rippled momentum of les Assises fades into collective oblivion, the educational domain has come to a standstill. It’s a mirage. No less, the dysfunctions of the system continue to insidiously gnaw at the mental health of the nation, with a student population too naïve to come to grips with the systemic inadequacies. It would tantamount to denial of assistance to a person in predicament if pleading economic constraints or what, nothing is done and done well. Cancellation of AP would be far more complex than imagined in some quarters, unless a patchwork, make-believe, is (again!) being envisaged, perfunctorily evoking the theoretical endowment of support teachers. “I don’t take right decisions. I take decisions and then make them right.” – A quote attributed to Ratan Tata, today, a legacy to humanity, couldn’t be more imperative in this context.