Gauteng a magnet for ‘outside’ pupils
● Gauteng schools are bursting at the seams as hordes of pupils coming from outside the province desperately seek admission.
More than 100 000 pupils from other provinces and almost 23 000 from other countries were admitted to Gauteng schools last year.
That was a huge jump from previous years. In 2016, 77 702 pupils migrated from other provinces and 12 344 from other countries.
This year, the province also has the highest number of pupils who have not been placed. With three days to go before the start of the school year, 31 056 pupils in the province still do not have a school to attend. Of these, 17 000 applied for admission between May and June, while the remainder applied in November.
Gauteng appears to be a much greater drawcard than the Western Cape, which is also known to be a magnet for pupils from other provinces.
Just under 20 000 pupils migrated to the Western Cape from other provinces last year, 4 401 fewer than the previous year. The number of pupils coming from other countries also dropped slightly, from 2 053 in 2016 to 2 014 last year.
More than 12.3 million pupils at state schools will head to class on Wednesday.
Gauteng education MEC Panyaza Lesufi said people from elsewhere in Africa believed that the best education they could get was in South Africa, particularly in Gauteng.
“People from rural areas believe the best education they can get is in Johannesburg, while people from townships believe the best education they can get is in the suburbs. Diepsloot, for example, has an abnormally high number of foreign learners in our schools.”
Commenting on the unplaced pupils, Lesufi said: “Those that say ‘MEC, place me where there is space’, we will place them. But those that say ‘I want my child at Jeppe Boys and nothing else’, if Jeppe Boys is full, there’s nothing we can do.”
According to Gauteng’s recently released state of education report, the Tshwane south and Johannesburg east districts “remain the ones most impacted by in-migration”.
The report stated that “increased enrolments increase resourcing pressure on the GDE [Gauteng department of education]”.
Servaas van der Berg, a professor of economics at Stellenbosch University, said that as children moved up the grades ladder there was a tendency for them to join either families or parents who were working in the metropolitan areas.
“There is a perception that the schools are better and they have a better chance of getting a good matric.
“My guess would be that you would see higher numbers particularly in Grades 8, 9 and 10 migrating. It’s less so in Grades 11 and 12 because that’s a little late to go.”
Van der Berg added: “Gauteng is the economic hub but it’s also known that education is generally better there than it would be in the Eastern Cape or Limpopo or in the rural parts of KwaZulu-Natal and the Free State. In terms of black people looking for jobs, Gauteng is the more obvious target area.”
He said that the 101 585 pupils who moved to Gauteng from other provinces last year could also be regarded as “some sort of measure of parental concern about quality of education” in some parts of the country.
Western Cape education department spokesman Paddy Attwell said almost all popular schools were full.
“Some schools are reluctant to take in more learners and we will continue to engage schools on capacity as we try to place additional learners.
“The Western Cape is under tremendous pressure to accommodate all learners. The province has attracted more than 130 000 learners from other provinces over the past five years, mainly from the Eastern Cape, and the province has not received additional funding to cover this growth.”
Attwell said enrolments this year were expected to increase by 10 000.
The number of unplaced pupils for Grade 1 and Grade 8 — the start of primary school and high school respectively, and which are historically the most oversubscribed grades — in other provinces are:
Limpopo: 1 895
North West: 9 101
Western Cape: 7 668
Eastern Cape: 4 831
The other provinces could not provide figures.