Social promotion is the practice of promoting schoolchildren to the next grade, to keep them with their peers, regardless of whether they are capable of doing grade-level work.
Some advocates of social promotion argue that keeping children together by age (together with their age cohort ) is an intrinsically important factor, and that being "kept back" would be inexcusably painful for a child emotionally. Opponents of social promotion argue that it cheats the child of an education and can hide teacher ineptitude.