Czech elementary school students redo years less, survey suggests


Some 4.9 percent of Czech fifteen-year-olds who took part in the OECD's PISA 2012 survey, admitted to having had to repeat or redo a year in elementary school at least once. The number is lower than the average 12 percent of 61 countries involved in the project. Belgium, Luxembourg and Spain all posted considerably higher numbers - between 30 and 39 percent. Under the education law in the Czech Republic, students are only allowed to redo a single year (between grades 1-9) once. Authors of the survey maintained that children who repeated due to poor marks were more likely not to complete school overall, suggesting that repeating grades neither benefitted the students in question, nor the education system as a whole.