Yet another idea to improve exam results

Monitoring children’s progress in schools is becoming a lot more scientific these days. No more going on a hunch. Each child’s work is measured regularly against set criteria and their progress monitored against the expected norm.
 
At the end of each year, every child is expected to have moved on and most should have reached the levels expected by the end of that particular year.
 
But what if they don’t?
 
What if a child fails to learn most or even some of the skills expected during that year?
 
The usual answer is that the child moves up with their year group to be faced with even more complex demands. So if you fail, you just get given more and harder stuff to study so that you can fail even more spectacularly.
 
Does that make sense?
 
Why not make achieving a certain rate of progress each year mandatory? Don’t make the grade, repeat the year. Doesn’t it make sense to repeat the things that couldn’t be taken on board during the year, perhaps this time with some specialist assistance?
 
Teachers already know at the end of Year One who is struggling and who most likely won’t make it through the infants and into mainstream juniors. Why not give these strugglers some more time? Let them repeat the year and see if they’re just late developers. Come the end of the following year it will be absolutely clear who needs the full time support of a different learning environment.
 
Then there are those children who can cope through the infants but who plateau early into their junior experience. Again, let them repeat a year and see if it makes a difference. Do this with every year group throughout every primary and secondary schools every single year.
 
If you need to formalise it, then hold back all of those who fail by a significant margin (say 20%) to achieve the expected year end levels in Maths and English.
 
Failing twice at the same level, the second time despite the use of in school support, clearly indicates that this particular child cannot access the curriculum of a mainstream education and should move into some form of special education.
 
By the time we reach the GSCE year, we should have a cadre of students who at least stand a good chance of achievement at the expected levels. We will also have removed from mainstream all of those who for whatever reason can no longer make the progress expected of them.
 
Now isn’t that more logical than educating by age regardless of progress?