Johannesburg - The Gauteng online application system is at the heart of MEC Panyaza Lesufi’s bid to transform schools in the province to reflect new demographics and redraw the boundaries.
These plans have, however, pitted him against former Model C schools who want to hold to language policies despite their feeder area demographics changing.
Lesufi has come under fire for shortcomings of the new online system for failing to place 58 000 pupils in schools before the start of the year.
The Overkruin and Montana Hoërskool hauled him to court, saying they did not want to enrol any more English-medium pupils in their schools.
The schools claimed they did not have the capacity to teach English-medium pupils because they were Afrikaans-medium. They instead proposed the department build a new school for the excess pupils.
The case was struck off the roll and deemed not urgent.
After the court ruling, Lesufi and his team met management teams from both schools and they agreed to accept the pupils.
Lesufi said he understood some of the issues with schools not wanting to admit extra pupils were motivated by “racial undertones”.
“We had a long and difficult meeting with the SGBs.
There are frustrations and fears on how to manage the two groups of learners because of what happened at the Pretoria High School for Girls.
The schools were worried about having two sets of rules to discipline English and Afrikaans pupils,” he said.
He said added support would be given to the schools to ensure all pupils were treated fairly.
“It’s tough but we are going to get it right. The mere fact that we were able to get English classes in those two schools is progress,” the MEC said.
But Overkruin and Montana are not the only institutions that have resisted the use of the online application system.
“Some schools actually attempted to resist the new system to maintain past practices and to that end, some ran a parallel admission process. “Districts had to ensure that schools followed the admission regulations and turned back submitted list where discrepancies were found,” he said.
Lesufi said the department was not interested in polarising communities but ensuring that all pupils are placed in schools.
“Our schools are feeling pressure and we have to meet it. We cannot punish people who are choosing Gauteng. I want to deny any insinuations our officials are heavy-handed and threaten principals.
We are not in a position to impose anything, we just persuade.”
About 19000 pupils have still not been placed.
And despite the criticism about not ensuring pupils are in class on time, the MEC said the department “just have to find a way of absorbing these numbers”.
“My view is very simple: put learners in the classroom and every learner must have a textbook, every learner must have a chair, every learner must have a teacher.
We will deal with the consequences.”
Lesufi said they would go back to the Constitutional Court to confirm new feeder zones to ensure next year’s applications go smoothly. Last year, the Federation of School Governing Body took the department to court over admission regulations. Under the current regulations, a child can attend a school within a 5km radius of their home or parents work.
The court gave the department 12 months to set fresh rules to determine feeder zones.
Lesufi said they wanted to issue the proposed feeder zones early so if there were disagreements, they could be resolved before applications for the 2018 year started.