Thanks for the replies ladies.

I'd love to take him to a Montessori school but there are none near us. This school has a bus service which picks him up and brings him back as both DH and i work.

I will talk to the school about allowing him to mix with his own age group during lunch and recess in their area.

They did want to keep DS down in grade 2 last year just for social reasons but still give him year 3 work and we thought that the teacher wouldn't be able to do it properly. Teachers now days have enough on their plate as it is. Plus, at the end of last year, he got an academic excellence award which had grade 1 on it. He was most upset and so was i. When i approached the school, they told me that the teacher did not know which grade he was in Yes, he was in a composite 1/2 but you would know which child is in which grade level, so that broke our confidence in the school too, hence not allowing him to stay down but to move on into a straight year 3.

Children are sooo mean these days. We never had this back in our days