Non‐promotion or enrolment in a lower track? The influence of social background on choices in secondary education for three cohorts of Dutch pupils

Abstract

Research on educational careers generally regards non‐promotion (grade retention) as harmful for the subsequent educational career. The present study argues that in tracked education systems, such as that in the Netherlands, non‐promotion may appear to be an attractive option for under‐achieving children, especially when the alternative is to enrol in a lower track. We hypothesise that particularly high‐status pupils and their parents will choose non‐promotion over transition to a less demanding educational track. Our analysis is based on three cohorts of Dutch pupils, who started their secondary school careers in 1989, 1993 and 1999, respectively. The findings support our hypothesis that social background has a positive effect on non‐promotion, compared to transition to a lower track. The data do not support our expectation that the attractiveness of non‐promotion increased after the introduction in 1999 of the unpopular pre‐vocational track (VMBO).

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the anonymous reviewers of the Oxford Review of Education for their helpful comments on a previous version of this article.

Notes

1. The data‐set for cohort 1999 (VOCL, 1999) has not been released by the commissioners and executive authorities, which are Statistics Netherlands (CBS), the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) and the Groningen Institute for Educational Research (GION). As a result, we were unable to merge the data‐sets of the various cohorts and had to perform the analyses per cohort. The analyses for cohort 1999 were performed on site at Statistics Netherlands.

2. Officially, in cohort 1999, 19,391 pupils were followed from their first year in secondary education. Statistics Netherlands (CBS) merged this file with the Municipal Personal Records Database (GBA). The link between these data was not possible for 90 pupils, whereupon Statistics Netherlands decided to remove these pupils from the data‐set.

3. In our data, a small number of HAVO and VWO pupils proceeded without diploma to tertiary education, an out‐of‐the‐ordinary transition in the Dutch education system. In the Netherlands, individuals aged 21 or older without eligibility to enter tertiary education can gain access to this educational level by passing a special entrance exam (colloquium doctum). Since the pupils in our data make the transition to tertiary education before age 21, we decided to consider these pupils as qualified.

4. Table 2 and Table 4 do not present the results regarding the choice between moving upwards and non‐promotion/graduating with delay.

5. To test whether the effects significantly differ between cohort 1989 and cohort 1993, we constructed interaction terms between cohort and parental education, gender, ethnicity and academic performance. We could not employ the same procedure to test for significance of the differences in effects between cohort 1989 and cohort 1999 and between cohort 1993 and cohort 1999 because the analyses for cohort 1999 were performed on site at Statistics Netherlands. To learn whether these effects significantly differ, we used T‐tests, assuming no covariance between the samples. The number of cases is large enough to make this assumption. We also carried out a control. The results of the interaction terms regarding cohort 1989 and cohort 1993 are similar to those of the performed T‐tests.