With the 2023 online admissions for grades one and eight starting today, Gauteng education MEC Panyaza Lesufi has revealed the system has undergone technical upgrades to prevent any hiccups.
However, there appears to be system failures already, with some parents expressing their frustrations on social media app Twitter this morning.
According to the parents, the Gauteng Department of Education’s (GDE’s) online admission system is not allowing new registrations or logging-in, schools are not appearing, the system doesn’t recognise the feeder zones, and there is an inability to select home language and preferred language, to list a few of the issues.
The GDE also tweeted: “Google Maps has temporarily removed us from their system for having reached a maximum of 6 000 requests per minute.”
The department further stated it’s working on “increasing the capacity to 20 000 requests per minute”, promising to resolve the issue within 30 minutes.
The GDE’s schools online registration system for grade one and eight learners was initiated to prevent long queues and encourage a tech-savvy school registration process.
The system has, however, been plagued by a number of recurring challenges, including an inability to handle multiple users at a time.
Speaking on talk station Radio 702 yesterday, Lesufi stated improvements to the system will mean the application process will be “easier and smarter” this time around.
According to the provincial education department, the Department of Home Affairs opened a secure dedicated portal to handle the requests from the system.
“We’ve linked up with major government portals – the Department of Home Affairs as well as the GPS system, so that parents don’t have to spend time typing in their names or their addresses,” said Lesufi.
“We’ve also strengthened the technical capability of it. We can take 40 000 people [applications] at the same time, so that there is no element of the system crashing, hanging or not functioning. We’ve also ensured we can extend this to 120 000 complete applications within an hour.”
The 2023 Gauteng schools online registrations opened today and close on 19 August.
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