School blues: Parents and migration
Thousands of children in the Western Cape and Gauteng have yet to be placed in schools
Thirty-nine thousand children in the Western Cape and Gauteng don’t have a school to go to at the start of their academic year because their parents are stubborn and as a result of migration from one province to another.
On Tuesday, Gauteng Education MEC Panyaza Lesufi announced that 28435 grade one and eight pupils had still not been placed in schools.
The Western Cape’s spokesperson, Jessica Shelver, said they had to still place more than 11000 pupils, with about 7000 of these in grades one and eight.
The bottleneck in these provinces seems to have been caused by parents who have school preferences that they refuse to change.
Both provinces said this was because parents wanted their children to attend particular schools even though there was no space for them. Lesufi said the majority of the children who had not been placed but had applied on time were those whose parents had applied in highpressure areas where there is a shortage of space at the schools. The parents had declined to take up offers at other schools.
Since the introduction in 2016 of the online application process for grades one and eight pupils, Gauteng has experienced glitches in placing pupils on time regardless of whether they had applied in good time. At the start of the 2017 academic year, the province had still not placed more than 50 000 children in schools. Places were only found as late as March. It is likely that pupils who have not yet been placed this academic year will suffer the same fate.
In the Western Cape, Shelver said no parents would be “guaranteed their first school of choice” and that parents would be referred to schools where there was still space.
“More than 130000 learners have moved to the Western Cape from other provinces over the past five years, mainly from the Eastern Cape, placing the education system in the Western Cape under considerable pressure,” said Shelver. “The challenge arises when people move to the province without planning in advance or without enrolling their children at a school. It therefore makes it impossible for the education department to foresee and plan accordingly.”
This migration is an ongoing problem for Gauteng and the Western Cape, the provinces with the largest economies. The provinces cannot turn them away.
In a parliamentary reply last year Minister of Basic Education Angie Motshekga said this movement of pupils to other provinces in January and March had a negative effect because schools had long since made their arrangements for the new year.
She added: “They place a huge pressure on the receiving province to accommodate them and provide all the necessary resources and support. The financial impact and cost to the provincial education department is huge as this is not factored into the norms and standards allocation.”
She revealed that, from 2013 to 2017, 99 050 children from the Eastern Cape moved to the Western Cape. The second-largest number of pupils who migrated to the Western Cape came from other countries and, from 2013 to 2017, that figure was 9 395.
According to the Gauteng department of education, from 2013 to 2016, the majority of new pupils in the province were from Limpopo, with more than 20 000 new entrants each year.
Last year, more than 23 000 pupils came from the North West and about 17 000 from Limpopo.
Pupils from foreign countries made up just over 20000 of the school intake last year.