Gauteng premier Panyaza Lesufi talks a good talk. So much so that he has risen through the ranks of his party, the ANC, at a relatively fast pace.
The place where he first grabbed the Gauteng public attention was when he was the MEC for education. He always managed to personally make it to the spotlight of any scene where tensions ran high.
He can never be accused of “not being seen to be doing nothing”.
His most famous brainchild as MEC for education before becoming premier is the Gauteng online school admission system for Grades 1 and 8, which he launched in 2015 to great fanfare.
On paper, the system is the most brilliant piece of innovation in Gauteng education since the dawn of democracy.
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Theoretically, it was designed to take away the yearly hustle which saw parents queue for up to three days at the beginning of each school year to secure places for children at their school of choice.
It had indeed become ridiculous that some of the schools that were considered prime picks for parents saw snaking queues outside their premises every year.
And when Lesufi conceived and launched online applications, it was an immediate answer to a pressing problem.
In practice, however, the system has become a nightmare for some parents.
And it is the same story every year: thousands of pupils who could not be allocated a school by the system, only beginning their Grades 1 and 8 journeys weeks later than other pupils because they could not be placed at a school.
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This year, more than 170 000 applications were put in for Grade 1 and more than 350 000 in total with Grade 8 included.
Since the online portal could not cope with the high number of applications, it kicked out thousands of applications of parents who applied on time, leading to more than 11 000 late applications.
While the department cannot shoulder the blame for parents who genuinely decide at the last minute to relocate to Gauteng and join the late application queue, there are still thousands of applications that do not get captured every year because the online portal cannot cope.
It has always been Lesufi’s strategy to shift the blame for such onto parents’ poor planning, but this clearly ignores the problem of parents who have done everything by the book, but ended up having to run around to district offices to secure a spot for their children.
No amount of good talk can vindicate a system that is clearly failing parents.
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There are numerous stories of parents who do everything by the book, but find themselves having to join the late application queues like some irresponsible adults who do not care for the welfare of their children.
It’s time to acknowledge that even though the system works for the majority of the applications, one child who misses a day of school because the system failed is one child too many.
The National Senior Certificate exam results have allowed mediocrity to become acceptable because the focus is always on improving the overall percentage of pupils who pass matric.
It is not the quality of the pass or the actual ability of the child who obtains the certificate.
The focus is always on how many children obtain the bare minimum to exit the system.
The focus on the efficacy of any education system, the online application system must always be “no child left behind”.
No child must be outside the classroom when school starts, just as no child should feel they are carrying a worthless school-leaving certificate when they exit the education system.
