The Gauteng Department of Education (GDE) received 332,477 unique admission applications for the 2023 school year. Around 157,697 of these were applications for Grade 1 placement while Grade 8 placement applications accounted for 174,780 learners. Around 87,7% of these learners have been placed in schools.
Newly appointed Gauteng Education MEC Matome Chiloane revealed that more than 35,000 learners have not yet been placed in schools for the 2023 school year. This equates to around 12% of the total applications received by the department.
Despite the thousands of unplaced learners, the MEC is confident that the province will meet their 30 November deadline to place all learners.
The MEC is urging parents to accept school placement offers from the GDE. This is because more than 5,000 parents have not accepted the offers they received via SMS from the provincial education department.
They also warned that the failure of parents to accept placement offers clogs up the provinces’ online admissions system. This is because when the department offers a placement at a school to parents, it reserves that place and the system indicates that it is occupied. This prevents this space from being offered to other learners.
“It would have been ideal for them to actually accept so that they can take an opportunity of a preferred school but if they don't do that, the system will do that. So by the 30th [of November], there will be no spaces, we would have closed their spaces automatically” explained the MEC
The parents need to accept so that they can free up more spaces so that we can place more learners into those other spaces.
These learners will be placed automatically in available spaces at the first school they were offered a space at. The online admissions system usually provides parents with placement offers from two to three schools.
The MEC added that parents who had incomplete applications, including those with incorrect documentation will be dealt with by the GDE from 15 December 2022.
