DA seeks Human Rights Commission’s intervention to ensure learners’ placement before the end of this week
19 January 2022
The Democratic Alliance (DA) in Gauteng has written to the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) seeking its intervention to ensure that all unplaced learners across the province are allocated school placements before the end of this week.
The unplaced learners are being denied their constitutional right to access basic education by the Gauteng Department of Education.
This is unacceptable, as learners will continue to miss out on the much-needed everyday schooling. Furthermore, these learners have already fallen behind in the curriculum due to the rotational learning that was adopted due to the Covid-19 pandemic. This has severely affected the quality of the basic education being offered to our children.
The DA has been inundated with calls and emails from parents whose children have not been allocated school placements and we have escalated these emails and calls to both the Gauteng Department of Education MEC, Panyaza Lesufi and Head of Department to ensure that all learners are placed, however, to date, nothing has happened as many learners are still sitting at home and are still to be allocated school placements.
The Gauteng Department of Infrastructure Development (DID) has also contributed to this crisis as it consistently fails to build schools according to specifications as well as fails to pay service providers on time and to meet deadlines. This has had a hugely negative impact on learner admissions as many projects are on hold which is delaying the intake of more learners at the start of the academic year.
The SAHRC has a responsibility to protect and advance the interests of our children and its’ intervention will assist in speeding up the school placement. We also demand that MEC Lesufi must engage independent schools to assist in enrolling some learners and give independent schools a budget to build additional classrooms, so they can place all learners who are sitting at home and have not been allocated school placements.
Issued by Khume Ramulifho, DA Gauteng Shadow MEC for Education, 19 January 2022
