Primary school teachers and parents’ views on automatic promotion practices and its implications for education quality

The core findings of the article:
• Automatic promotion affects interest and motivation to learning.
• Automatic promotion contributed for educational wastage when its undesired spillover effect spread to students.
• Universalisation of primary education has become a revolutionary result rather than a systematised and developmental process.
• The sustainability of universalisation of primary education has become questionable.

This paper focuses on the practice of automatic promotion in primary schools of Ethiopia. It uses interview and survey data to examine teachers’ practices and parents’ views and synthesise its implications on quality of education. In light of the international literature and the education and training policy (ETP), the study investigated whether the Ethiopian school context promotes the basic premises of automatic promotion—providing universal primary education and maintaining the value of education through improving its quality. The study reveals that tutoring is the major type of teachers’ support to improve academic performance of students. Although some parents and teachers appreciate the importance of promoting students, automatically promoted students face difficulty to meet the standards required in the next grade level, which in turn decrease their interest and motivation to learning. The absence of a systematic and consistent implementation guideline on automatic promotion produced inconsistent practices among teachers and schools. The study also uncovers that the practice of automatic promotion may have contributed to educational wastage when its undesired spillover effect (low interest, low effort, and poor attendance) has spread to students who could have attended classes regularly and demonstrated better learning outcomes. It is concluded that promoting low achieving students in the absence of appropriate support system results in low interest to attend classes and poor learning which eventually leads to drop out from schooling.