Impossible to immediately place late applicants, Lesufi warns
The Gauteng Department of Education says it’s impossible to immediately place grade 1 and 8 pupils whose parents only applied in January.
Education MEC Payanza Lesufi briefed the media on Tuesday ahead of the new school year.
Over 300 000 applications were received during the online application process, with the department placing at least 266 000 pupils.
Late applications were extended in November 2018 and officially closed on Monday.
A frustrated Lesufi said the department has been inundated with thousands of new applications.
“If you come to the department for the first time today and you expect your child to sit on a desk tomorrow, to be taught by a teacher, to get a meal and transported to school tomorrow, it is practically impossible. We normally give a 10% increase estimate, to say that our learner number may decrease by this much and when we open late registration, we plan the number we may expect. To get thousands of people now coming to our district offices a serious cause of concern.”
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Only 863 schools in Gauteng still have space and the majority of the schools are in the townships.
Lesufi said there were also 16 000 parents who failed to submit all documents.
Some of those spaces were subsequently given to other applicants.
“All these 16 000 parents we placed their children, but not at their ideal schools. Majority of the parents have now submitted appeal forms. We will attend to those appeals, but I want to warn and caution parents, if you appeal that you don’t want the school that we have had to place them in, we will remove your child and replace them. Your child might be left without a place in any school because we have demonstrated that we placed your child because we cannot hold that space for you.”
He did, however, move to assure parents that their children will be placed but asked for patience as the process cannot be done overnight.
“Last year, by this time we had 25 000 learners that needed to placed and we managed to place all of them. We know this happens and we ensure that the first few days of schools will deal with orientation programs, so parents must not panic. We are working very hard to deal with this.”