Both the General Approach and Alternate Approach to promotion are acceptable ways to promote Children's Ministry participants. Which you choose simply depends on your children's ministry model as well as your preference for how data is logged and maintained over time.

Both methods maintain attendance records for past and current Participants.

The main difference is that one keeps the Participants intact and the other moves them Group to Group.

In the General Approach:

• The group names change to reflect the grade, so there is no movement from group to group. The Group/Participant relationship stays the same from year to year. 
• You can look at the Participant's attendance across years easily.
• This is the simplest approach, but you lose the ability to easily see a "snapshot" of a Group in the past.
• This approach gives you fewer records. For example, the Group named "12th Grade" was called "11th Grade" a year ago and "10th Grade" the year before that, so the Group really represents the Class of 2017 and all the records tied to the Group can be thought of that way.

The Alternative Approach has two varieties: sharing the same group or creating new ones.

• In the first case, you keep the groups for each grade but move Participants between them. In this case, the "12th Grade" group is the same group as it was last year, with different students in it. It would be easier to see what things the Senior class has done over time than the Class of 2017.
• In the second case, Participants are added each year to a new Group and the old Group Participants are end-dated. This means there is always a snapshot of every grade every year. The "12 Grade" group from last year represents that particular class for that specific year, so you'll have a "12th Grade" for 2016 that is snapshot and a "12th Grade" for 2015 that is snapshot.
• Both take more work than the general approach but the benefit is you can go back and see historical data. A con is that you have a lot of records over time.