It's likely that Friday's announcement by the Ministry of Education that 24 students will repeat their M3 year in middle school rather than going on to Berkeley Institute or CedarBridge Academy will cause some debate in education circles and in the broader community.

That's because the concept of so-called "social promotion", in which students advance from one year to the next, even if they clearly are not reaching the standards expected of them at a particular age, has been highly contentious.

The principle behind the idea is that the costs to a student's social development of not moving forward with their contemporaries, especially in the sensitive adolescent years, is greater than the academic problems the student may face as they move inexorably through the school system. It can be further argued that schools should provide remedial support to the children to be sure that they can keep up with their fellow students.

The flip side of the argument is that the latter effort does not happen, and, indeed, the cost to the system of providing such remedial support would be enormous. Instead, opponents say, failing students fall further and further behind and are doomed to fail to graduate – if they haven't dropped out already – at which point, uneducated and unskilled, they will be cast out into the real world.

This may be overstating the case, but it certainly reflects a large part of the public's view of social promotion.

It is true that children can be cruel, and will accuse a child who repeats a year of being stupid. And it is also true that children and adolescents are especially vulnerable to this kind of teasing .

But is also worth noting that the ages at which children begin school are entirely arbitrary. The child who turned five on January 1, 2009 will start school this September, as will the child who turns five on December 31, 2009. All things being equal, the January baby will be that much more "ready for school" than the child born one day short of a year later. And yet our system determines that, for purposes of advancement, they are exact contemporaries.

The truth is that there is no shame in repeating a school year. As horrifying as it may seem to be to a 14-year-old today, no university admissions officer, let alone an employer, is going to worry about what age a person was when they graduated from school or if they repeated a year. The only question they will have is whether they can do the work asked of them when they reach university or start a job.

It is worth noting that a great many Bermudians now study for and pass the General Equivalency Diploma (GED) which is the equivalent of graduating from the Bermuda school system. Success in this exam carries no stigma; it is worth asking how many of these students might have graduated from school if they had had the chance to repeat a year.

It is now generally recognised that people progress at different speeds. Boys, it seems, progress a little more slowly than girls, especially in the early teen years. Some people are better at maths than English, or are stronger in social studies than the sciences. When a student needs more time, they should given it. By the same token, high achievers need to be challenged and pushed to excel. This reality should not be taken as a justification for social promotion; instead it should show that there is nothing wrong with some students taking longer to grasp concepts than others. Better that these students repeat work early than cruise through the system, only to fail to graduate.

It must be said that the initial "testing" was not well managed by Berkeley and Cedar Bridge and that students, who first took the exam on the Friday of the Annual Exhibition (normally a school holiday), were under the impression it was a placement exam, not an acceptance exam. In future years, no doubt, middle schools will take them more seriously and the senior schools will be more upfront. But if the students who are repeating the year were given genuine opportunities to progress and showed they had areas where they still needed help, then it will do them no harm to go over the work again. What is important is that this not be seen as a shameful thing, but as a second chance for these students to excel. They should grasp it with both hands.