A disheartened kid...

One of my Year 7 group students were so disheartened when he was facing his Term 1 mandarin result and he was almost in tears. It would be quite unfair for him as he is a total beginner in the Chinese language but he has to be in the same classroom with other more experienced students who are however at more upper-beginning levels. In school like Harrow, it is extremely difficult to allocate the students into appropriate levels as there are limited human resources as well as time constrains. In such a mix-ability classroom where students at a competitive period of their life, I wonder how I could make him more comfortable with the result and see it more positively.