That's just not true. Elementary school students only repeat a year in exceptional cases, because it has been scientifically proven that repeating a grade actually worsens performance at that age. They move up to the next grade, but their poor results are not swept under the rug. In middle and high school, however, repeating a year is certainly possible; I repeated a year in high school myself, and that wasn't thirty years ago. In middle school, you can fail the brevet exam. In a general high school track, you can be rejected or redirected to a technological high school, while students in a technological track can be sent to a vocational high school.