No timeline, no plan as Gauteng Department of Education continues to fail unplaced learners

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.

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 have been in place to deal with what is clearly a foreseeable and recurring crisis every year.

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.

In Gauteng, besides the issue of learner migration, the online registration mechanism introduced in 2015 has generated a unique set of vexing issues that remain unaddressed. The system is an administrative barrier for undocumented learners who cannot register without the requisite documents. This is notwithstanding that the requirement of compulsory documentation as requisite for admission is unconstitutional, according to the case of Centre for Child Law v Minister of Basic Education.

Indifferent to parental choice

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 of Equal Education v Head of Department: WC Department was 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.

The judgment also notes that the first applicant, Equal Education and the Equal Education Law Centre, have for a number of years attempted to address this issue with the Western Cape Education Department by asking it to develop a plan to manage the issue of late placements, but to no avail.

The organisations first began engaging with the department because of a group of unplaced learners in 2021, however despite the best efforts of the organisation to bring the matter to the attention of the department, the learners remained unplaced and out of school for the entire academic year. Similar problems occurred again in 2022, resulting in a successful urgent court application.

Obligation

The South African Schools Act (Sasa) and National Admission Policy for Ordinary Public Schools task the head of a provincial education department with the obligation to provide schools for all learners in a province, and to manage the admissions of learners to public schools together with school governing bodies by ensuring that all eligible learners are accommodated.

Furthermore, the legal framework requires that the admission policy of a public school and the administration of admissions by provincial departments does not unfairly discriminate against any applicant for admission.

A Western Cape provincial admission policy requires that learners apply for admission in the year prior to that in which they wish to begin their studies, but the policy is vague regarding late applications, requiring only that those applicants present themselves to the district office in the area where the learner would attend school.

Thus, the judgment notes that:

“[W]hen the learners, parents, or their caregivers presents themselves at the district office as directed, the district officials who have access to the online system will advise them about the available places at various schools. The unwritten policy of the Western Cape Education Department indicates that the district office does not participate in helping these learners access different schools. The parents, learners and caregivers are given the information and must individually approach the school to find placement. The procedure becomes so onerous that they have to approach dozens of schools before they secure placement. The probability is that learners, parents and caregivers will face a financial strain due to travel and additional informational resources they lack, resulting in a stressful and challenging experience.”

The court therefore declared the provincial admission policy to be unconstitutional and in violation of, among other rights, the immediately realisable right to basic education; the right to equality on the basis that the policy unfairly discriminates against unplaced learners on the basis of race, poverty level, place of birth, and social origin, stating that these learners live in particular hotspot areas.

‘Longtime psychological damage’

It noted that: “The Western Cape Education Department must ensure that it treats the late applications in the same manner and on equal footing with those of other applicants who fall within the usually cut-off period for applications. A learner who is not placed at the start of the academic year and has to watch his or her peers attend school every day, such exclusion will inadvertently cause longtime psychological damage to a child’s psyche who yearns to go to school.”

The court also underscored the importance of understanding the causes of migration, tracking the trends, identifying the hotspots, and anticipating the numbers of late applications based on patterns from previous years in order to develop a plan to deal with the late applications. The court declared the absence of such a plan to be in violation of learners’ rights, and ordered the Western Cape Education Department to develop an admissions plan in consultation with the stakeholders and the general public within six months of the order.

Significantly, the court required that the policy be amended to include late applicants who remain unplaced for an indefinite period of each academic year. It also required the Western Cape Education Department to provide clarity on the process that these applicants must follow to secure their placement in relation to the timeline within which they would be placed in a school; and to provide the name and designation of the relevant department official who was responsible for ensuring the placement of late applicants.

Returning to Gauteng, the admissions process set out in the Gauteng Regulations Relating to the Admission of Learners to Public Schools is similarly vague on the processes when learners remain unplaced despite having applied, and for late applications. The 2026 Gauteng Department of Education online process closed at the end of August 2025 but the department later announced that late applications would open from 17 December 2025 and would close on 30 January 2026. Only schools that have not been declared full appear on the online system, and parents are limited to applying to one school only.

The absence of clear regulation and plans for learners who remain unplaced despite having applied or who apply late; the failure to reasonably accommodate undocumented learners and the apparent disregard for parental choice irrespective of a family’s circumstances suggests that the Gauteng Department of Education is vulnerable to a similar legal challenge to that of the Equal Education case.

It would therefore be prudent for Gauteng Department of Education to consult with civil society stakeholders, school governing body associations and parents to address the legal gaps in the regulations and develop a plan to address structural issues such as learner migration to ensure that no learner is left unplaced at the beginning of the academic year. DM

Faranaaz Veriava is an Associate Professor within the School of Law at the University of Pretoria and a Senior Fellow to Unesco Chair: Education Law in Africa.