28 000 without schools

More than one million pupils went back to school across Gauteng yesterday, but more than 28 000 will have to sit at home longer because the provincial department of education’s placement system has failed to find places for them.

Frustrated parents phoned radio talk shows across the province yesterday, complaining about the failures of the computerised placement system which has failed every year for the past three years and which education MEC Panyaza Lesufi has promised repeatedly will be fixed.

Even the “manual” placement system, which has seen hundreds of desperate parents queuing at education department offices over the past week, has not been up to the task of finding space for pupils. Education department spokesperson Steve Mabona indicated yesterday that the figure of 28 000 yet-to-be-placed children was accurate.
However, last year the Governing Body Foundation claimed that the non-placed figures were distorted by the online system and suggested that the figures turned out to be much lower. The body predicted that the same thing may be happening this year and that the 28 000 figure may be vastly inflated.

Mabona, however, failed to return requests for comment from The Citizen and specifically answers to questions, including: v Where is Gauteng standing in terms of extra classrooms that still need to be built? v How far along is the teacher appointment process for temporary and new teachers at schools for 2018? v Would you say the registration process has improved this time around compared to the last cycle?

The Centre for Child Law, which has been studying the problem of school placements since 2016, said in a statement that the Gauteng education department had failed to do accurate modelling to predict pupil numbers.

The centre was quoted by TimesLive as saying that better planning by the department could have prevented the current backlog in schools. It said its 2016 report “found that without information on the number of actual school places and proper projection of trends in pupil numbers‚ no proper planning and provision of infrastructure could occur. This, therefore, results in continued late placements that‚ in most cases‚ results in overcrowded classrooms”

Suggested solutions by the centre included updating a database to accurately reflect how many pupils each school in the province could accommodate. The centre also suggested using updated figures from Statistics South Africa to take into account migration data that reflected how many people came into the province.

It said that planners could also learn from past trends of pupil numbers to better predict how many pupils there would be.

– news@citizen.co.za

//

For more news your way, follow The Citizen on Facebook and Twitter.