Cape Town – The Western Cape Education Department has maintained (WCED) that its online application portal was effective, as a parent whose child is supposed to start grade 1 next year has expressed frustration over the system.
The parent says the system is not user friendly, and they have been struggling to access the portal to apply for 2023 school admissions.
Siya Ndamase, from Kuilsriver, said that he’d been getting an error message and was unable to complete his six-year-old’s school application.
“Last week I had problems with logging in. The link wasn’t going through and I thought it was my internet connection.
“It is giving me an error message. I am frustrated and anxious. It's going to be her first time in a big school; hence, I wanted to be one of the first ones to apply.
“There are many technicalities, including that the system doesn’t autosave, if you get distracted you have to start all over again. Even if you make a mistake, it doesn’t notify you and allow you to correct it,” he said.
Education MEC David Maynier said: “We have had a few technical niggles along the way, which is par for the course with the change to a new system. However, the move away from the notoriously unstable national government State Information and Technology Agency system has proved to be the right one.
“While SITA services experienced outages last week, our admissions system has remained up and running since the applications window opened. The stability of our site has meant that parents have been able to submit more applications successfully in the first week than last year.”
Maynier said that parents who experience technical problems must log a query using the “contact us” option at the top of the admissions page to get assistance from the technical team.
Cape Times