The Gauteng education department has launched the online applications for admission for grades 1 and 8 for 2024, and says the system is now able to capture 50,000 applications per minute.
The applications were opened on Thursday by Gauteng education MEC Matome Chiloane at the Winterveldt Multipurpose Hall outside Pretoria. This year’s aim was to improve the capacity of the system.
He said 12,000 applications were submitted within the first 10 minutes. An hour later, applications were at 60,000.
“We have improved the bandwidth and the ability to manage applications per minute. We improved this to 50,000 applications per minute and we have not got close to that capacity. I am sure by the end of the day we will have 200,000 to 300,000 applications.”
Gauteng education launches online application process for grades 1 and 8
The application system has been improved to handle thousands of applications per minute and is more user-friendly, says the department
The Gauteng education department has launched the online applications for admission for grades 1 and 8 for 2024, and says the system is now able to capture 50,000 applications per minute.
The applications were opened on Thursday by Gauteng education MEC Matome Chiloane at the Winterveldt Multipurpose Hall outside Pretoria. This year’s aim was to improve the capacity of the system.
He said 12,000 applications were submitted within the first 10 minutes. An hour later, applications were at 60,000.
“We have improved the bandwidth and the ability to manage applications per minute. We improved this to 50,000 applications per minute and we have not got close to that capacity. I am sure by the end of the day we will have 200,000 to 300,000 applications.”
By midday, 161,407 grade 1 and 8 applications were processed. This was a slight decrease from the same period last year which recorded more than 165,000 applications.
While the online system operates smoothly, one challenge faced was with the department of home affairs when applicants entered ID numbers onto the system.
“The department of home affairs’ verification mechanism used on the online admissions was unable to process certain ID numbers. However, this was resolved within a few minutes as we discovered applicants only had to refresh their browsers and proceed to apply successfully.”
Another issue was some parents who applied for grade 8 could not enter the name of the previous schools on the system, he said.
This was quickly resolved, Chiloane said.
The application period will run until July 14 and parents are urged to either upload certified copies of the required documents onto the system or submit them at the schools they apply to within seven school days.
“We have set up 80 walk-in centres in community halls and township areas. All our schools are also walk-in centres and parents can go straight there. We have municipal and provincial government libraries available to parents and there is a toll-free hotline for parents to call if they have problems. All one needs to apply is connectivity [to the internet].”
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