• Over 90 percent of all Grade 1 and Grade 8 learner registrations in the Western Cape ahead of the 2025 academic year were done digitally.
• Over 110 772 applications have been received by the province’s education department.
• The department has now set 12th May 2024 as the late admissions deadline on the online portal.

The Western Cape Department of Education says that as of the end of April 2024, it has received 110 772 applications for Grade 1 and 8 learners to begin the 2025 academic year, and that the vast majority of applications were made via the online admissions portal (90.4 percent).

This provides an example of how successful online admissions portals are for the registering of new learners, and a wake up call to the provinces in South Africa that have yet to launch online school registry portals.

Provinces like the Northern Cape have yet to launch online portals to capture admissions for learners, while most of the high-population provinces like Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal have used online admissions in the past.

To ensure that as many learners are registered as soon as possible and to allow the department to create enough space at schools, the Western Cape has even zero-rated its online admissions system to where it does not use any mobile data.

The system enables parents to select which nearby schools they would like their children to attend, and it is updated with relevant information, such as when their children are accepted to attend a certain institution. The province also offers school registration help at in-person pop-up centres at certain malls and government centres.

As the month comes to a close, the Western Cape Department of Education is now urging any parents who have yet to sign up their Grade 1 and Grade 8 children to begin schooling in 2025 to hurry up and register.

The latest sees the department issue a final deadline for latecomers, with the online registration portal set to close on 12th May 2024. The first application deadline was on 12th April, with the province’s education department concerned that there will still be parents who have not yet registered their children past the deadline which means they will struggle to find placement come 2025.

Parents are reminded that even if they have registered online, they will still need to drop off their children’s hard copy documents at the final choice school or the school they have received an offer from.

“Parents will start seeing the outcomes of their on-time applications online from 30 May 2024, and we will remind them of this as the date approaches,” the department says.

“Parents must then accept or decline successful offers before 14 June 2024, and we encourage them to do so as quickly as possible.”

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