School placement issues are perennial and systemic. This is unacceptable in a context where thousands of parents and learners remain anxious about securing places in schools. An urgent response and clear plan ought to be in place to deal with what is clearly a foreseeable and recurring crisis every year.
A new school year is upon us, however, approximately 5,000 learners in Grades 1 to 8 remain unplaced in Gauteng schools, according to the Gauteng Department of Education online application system. These numbers are probably higher because what would probably not be recorded on the system are the undocumented learners – many of whom are South African – who are prevented from registering online because of a lack of documentation. In mid-December 2025, Radio 702 hosted the Gauteng Department of Education spokesperson to respond to the public outcry in respect of the thousands of learners eligible to enter Grades 1 and 8, but who remained unplaced.
A clearly distressed mom called into the show saying that her child was starting Grade 1 but had still not been placed, despite having applied. The spokesperson said he would take her name and attempt to sort it out. When she requested a timeline for this, the department’s representative refused to give her one, because according to him most district managers were already on leave.
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Placement issues are perennial and systemic and the issues are varied. Gauteng and the Western Cape are provinces to which people from poorer provinces migrate annually in search of job opportunities and better resourced schools, and migrating learners can lose months of learning before they are placed in a school. The system is also largely indifferent to parental choice irrespective of how onerous a placement may be for a family.
It allows an applicant to apply for between three and five schools in a feeder zone in order of preference, but the applicant may not be given their first choice and an appeal may not be successful. A parent I consulted a few years ago complained that it would take her twice as long to get her child to the allocated school because it was much further than her school of choice, and was in a different direction to her work route, which would make getting her child to school difficult. These varied issues have resulted in public interest organisations being swamped with placement complaints at the beginning of each year, and having to negotiate and even threaten litigation as learners are turned away from schools.
Given these recurring, systemic issues, the Gauteng Department of Education would do well to heed a recent judgment of a full Bench of the Western Cape Division of the High Court that found that the failure to place learners in schools in the Western Cape was a violation of several of their rights. The judgment in the case ofEqual Education v Head of Department: WC Departmentwas delivered in November 2025. The judgment notes that issues of late learner placement have been systemic for more than a decade, with most late applications being the result of learners migrating from the Eastern Cape and that late placement applications repeatedly originate from specific demographic “hotspots” in poor black communities such as Khayelitsha and Kraaifontein.
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