Minster of Education Shaik Baksh said yesterday that the automatic promotion policy was put in place after a survey throughout secondary schools in the country found that on average 80 percent of students who were made to repeat a class later dropped out of school.
Defending the policy during a press briefing in the boardroom of the Ministry of Education on Brickdam, Baksh clarified that there was no such thing as a ‘No Child Left Behind’ policy in the ministry. “We have no such stipulated policy in the Ministry of Education. That is an American policy initiative by the Bush administration,” he said.
However, he pointed out that a circular titled ‘Grade Repetition Retention and Automatic Promotion’ was distributed among schools by the