Johannesburg - Education authorities will be burning the midnight oil over the weekend to ensure that the disastrous online school registration will be working properly on Tuesday.
But the Federation of Association of Governing Bodies (Fedsas) has demanded that the online registration be stopped by Monday - because, they say, it is illegal. And they may take legal action.
Gauteng education MEC Panyaza Lesufi has cancelled the leave of every employee at the department, demanding that everyone pulls together to guarantee parents that their children will be registered successfully.
“We will be working today and Sunday to ensure that this thing goes smoothly next week. We want parents to be proud one day when we get it right,” Lesufi told the Saturday Star on Friday.
He said the system on Tuesday would ensure that up to 3 000 parents could register per second. The department has roped in extra technicians and its switchboard manpower has been increased.
The system crashed this week, sending thousands of parents looking to register their children in Grade 1 next year into panic mode.
Fedsas chief executive Paul Colditz said on Friday: “We wrote to the department asking them to abandon the online process. We are not taking them to court at this stage. If they abandon the system there won’t be a need for this. We need to have a response from them before Tuesday,”
He said failure to do this would result in them considering the court route.
Colditz said the admission regulations of Gauteng made provisions for a physical paper process and not an online e-platform.
He said a primary concern was that there was no stringent means of verifying people’s identity documents.
He noted that the system contained a number of errors. He explained that if one makes a mistake and punches in the wrong details, there is no way of deleting this, which results in duplicated registrations.
While Lesufi apologised to parents for the glitches, Fedsas said this was not enough. “Digital is the way to go; provided it is reliable and also provided all parents have access to electronic platforms and are able to participate fully.”
While some schools, such as Rembrandt Park Primary and Maryvale College, have allowed parents to sign paper registration forms for their children, other schools, such as Linksfield Primary, are not accepting physical applications.
Tim Gordon, chief executive of the Governing Body Foundation, said: “We have completely lost any faith that the department, in a couple of days, can be able to put right what it has not been able to do in a year.”
Some governing bodies have voiced their support for the system. Matakanye Matakanya, secretary-general of the National Association of School Governing Bodies, said they understood that with any system there were often challenges but added that change was imperative.
National Congress of School Governing Bodies’ head of policy, Thekegelo Moleme, said while the department could not take a blanket approach for everyone and sideline those in rural areas, there was nothing wrong with technology. He said their stance was that everyone had to be online.
Saturday Star
* Use IOL’s Facebook and Twitter pages to comment on our stories. See links below.