Every year, the end of the school period entails the determination of student success or failure. In many nations around the world, those students who do not fulfil certain requirements and academic expectations are not promoted to the following grade. Across OECD countries, more than 10% of 15-year-old students (on average) have repeated a year at least once (OECD, 2016). In some European countries (e.g. Belgium, France, Germany, Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain) more than 15% of students fall into this category (Eurydice, 2020).

The regulations that sustain the practice of grade retention is usually based on the idea that it provides a new opportunity for learning and developing. Nevertheless, strong international evidence suggests otherwise.

Research on the topic has consistently indicated that being retained has negative academic and socioemotional effects (Jimerson, 2001; Manacorda, 2012; Treviño et al., 2015), and is linked to school absenteeism (Martin, 2011) and school dropout (Reschly and Christenson, 2013). The evidence has suggested that the lower the grade repeated, the greater the adverse effects (Ikeda and García, 2013). Additionally, grade retention has been related to educational inequality. Students from more vulnerable social backgrounds have higher possibilities of repeating (OECD, 2016). Besides, educational systems with higher rates of grade repetition have a stronger relationship between socio-economic background and achievement (Eurydice, 2020).

Although there have been attempts to limit the use of grade repetition practices in several countries (specially in lower grades), they remain the norm (in both primary and secondary education) in Europe and across the world (OECD, 2016; Eurydice, 2020). This study attempts to explore the reason behind this phenomenon. To do that, it changes the focus from the effects of the practice on individual retained students and educational equity to explore what productive forces make and sustain grade repetition and what is produced by it. In this way, the research examines the conditions under which grade retention’s logics and practices can exist, how they function, and their involvement in the processes that make primary education and make ‘the primary student’ in everyday life. The evidence is collected in primary schools in Chile. The country makes an interesting case of study for being one of the few members of the OECD located in the region with higher repetition figures in the world (Gómez, 2013), for having a high rate of grade retention, and due to the several educational reforms that have been undertaken over the last years, including its promotion regulations.

This inquiry is explored through a poststructuralist theoretical framework.  

The works of Foucault on power, knowledge and discourse (1990, 1991) are used as crucial tools to understand the productive implications of grade retention. Schools are considered disciplinary institutions where technologies of disciplinary power, including diverse forms of normalisation and correction, take place.

The implication of the practice on the construction of educational identities and categories is explored through Butler’s (1993) ideas on performativity. Butler and Athanasiou’s (2013) formulations on human deprivation and dispossession are used to reflect on the way in which grade repetition legitimises exclusion and violence when configurating these identities. The process by which marginal positions become a risk for educational goals in a neoliberal schools' context is explored by Kristeva’s concept of abjection (1982).

For its part, Deleuze and Guattari’s (1983, 2008) assemblage theory is used to conceptualise grade repetition as an ensemble of symbolic, material and affective elements that interact productively to articulate a field of understanding and activity. Additionally, the concept of ‘affect’ is used as an avenue to consider bodily intensities involved in grade repetition’s logics and practices and the ways in which they impact relations between school components.

The research is based on an ethnographically oriented case study conducted in six urban primary schools in Santiago, Chile. It is focused on grades first (6 to 7 years old students) and fifth (10 to 11 years old students) and their transition to the following grade. Although non-representative, the selection of schools tries to reflect the main types of institutions that provide primary education in urban areas of the country. The participant schools are diverse in terms of their administrative dependence, school levels, enrolment figures, socioeconomic characteristics, achievement outcomes and religious orientation. Evidence was collected through intensive classroom observations complemented with observations of other school life situations (school councils, parental meetings, final school year ceremonies, playtimes and extracurricular activities). Additionally, children were asked to draw and create stories about retained students, as a way to elicit their underlying affectivities and projections regarding the matter. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with teachers, psychologists, special education teachers, parents, principals and other school authorities. Field notes were taken throughout the fieldwork to register information, field experiences, research progress and the emergence of analytic themes. The collected information was examined through a discourse analysis informed by Foucauldian and other post-structuralist theoretical approaches.

The productive capacities of the ‘grade repetition ensemble’, and the forces configurating it, are considered in relation to three interrelated processes: subjectivation/abjection production, mechanisms of discipline and normalisation, and affective intensities. Subjectivation processes are formative elements of grade repetition logics and practices. The ‘immature/impossible/abject retained student’ becomes a discursive construction with symbolic and material effects over retained students and their environments. In many educational spaces these children are conceived as a threat that must be expelled before ‘contaminating’ (Kristeva, 1982). Grade retention arrangements are constituted within the logics of the disciplinary school. Students/learning homogeneity, assessment/outcomes primacy, authoritarian relationships, educational violence and the enforcement of ‘good conduct’ within the school space, are all entangled within the ‘grade retention ensemble’. Furthermore, grade repetition is exposed as an exclusionary device that - sustained by the rules of intelligibility of neoliberal education - ‘move’ students’ bodies between schools and even out of the educational system. Affective intensities ‘stuck’ (Ahmed, 2014) to grade repetition shape the educational territory as an object saturated by fear, sadness, shame, disgust and pride. These flows impact the nature of the bonds of educational communities and what their members can feel, do and be within them. Theoretical resources provided by assemblage theory are used along the frameworks of discourse and performativity to reflect on the contingent and fluid nature of these arrangements. Within this emergent space of reflection, we can envision educational identities and exchanges freed from fear, sadness and shame; learning processes that do not require fierce control over students bodies neither a spectacle of distinctions between those who success and those who fail within evaluative logics; communities in which pride, joy and belonging are based on love and respect instead of disgust and dispossession; and pedagogical territories that do not constraint but enhance students’ capacities.

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