All of the province’s children have been assigned to schools, according to Matome Chiloane, the Gauteng MEC for education.
However, parents who disagree with the selected schools are contesting the department’s decisions.
Another issue, according to Chiloane, was that parents would only apply for spots near the beginning of the new school year.
The system would then automatically place the child in the next available school by this point, since all other children had been placed.
According to him, this would lead to a surge of late applicants who would go to the districts and request a different school.
“Also now, we also have late applications that were sitting just above 14 000 yesterday [on Tuesday]. I am sure that the number will increase drastically today as it is the first day of the academic year,” said Chiloane.
He emphasised that township schools were responsible for the high matriculation results, saying parents should have faith in these schools ability to deliver high-quality education.
Cutting-edge school
According to Chiloane, parents still choose to wait in queue for admissions at ‘former model C’ schools rather than the townships’ best-performing schools.
Since the department is in charge of making sure that every child is placed in a school, he suggested that the parents of grade 1 and 8 pupils who have not yet been placed get in touch with their districts.
As schools reopened for the new year on Wednesday, Chiloane welcomed a new school built by the provincial department of infrastructure and development.
He claimed that although the school was nearly vandalised, the suspects only removed the billboard bearing the school’s name, Braamfischerville Primary School.
He claimed that this is a cutting-edge school with contemporary amenities like WiFi and brand-new classrooms.
“These are the schools that we talk about, the schools of the future that we want for our kids to get to adapt and also be technologically ready,” he said.
