I am sure that the founders of our democracy could not have imagined in the 1950s that their memorable declaration in the Freedom Charter that “the doors of learning and culture shall be open” would run into some heavy concrete walls in the 2020s, shutting out tens of thousands of school and university students. Somewhere in January, it was reported that 23,000 pupils in four provinces were unplaced, in the Western Cape 2,700 and in Gauteng 7,000. Many of the unplaced are in grades 1 and 8, the start of primary and high school, respectively.
Provinces tend to blame parents for late, last-minute and incomplete applications. Parents complain of bureaucracy and being turned away repeatedly after standing in long lines since the early morning or getting no responses from schools at all. On the one hand, it is true — parents often start the process when most schools have already filled their quotas for the year.
This is partly because of a lack of information about basics such as due dates and partly because of bad habits — why rush when eventually almost everybody gets accommodated, even if not in their choice of school? To take on more late application pupils, from a schools perspective, is to overcrowd classrooms. On the other hand, it is also true that the problem of unplaced pupils happens every single year.
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My question to the provinces is a simple one — where is the planning? Surely by now you would have been able to use basic statistics to plot application trends over time and allocated places and resources accordingly? What the provinces do not tell you is that there is no money.
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