Africa-Press – South-Africa. The Gauteng education department will begin issuing placement offers for the 2026 online admissions for grades 1 and 8 on Thursday, MEC Matome Chiloane announced on Sunday.
Parents and guardians with complete applications will start receiving placement offers through SMS notifications sent to the cellphone numbers they provided when applications were registered.Department spokesperson Steve Mabona said within seven days of receiving a placement offer, the parents/guardians must log on to the department’s admission website to either accept a placement offer as final or accept while awaiting other offers.
“It must be noted that when a parent accepts an offer from a school as final, the learner is then placed at that school. Placement offers that are accepted as final cannot be reversed,” Mabona said.The 2026 online admissions application period ran from July 24 to August 29. A total of 820,350 applications (Grade 1: 354,916; Grade 8: 465,434) were submitted by 358,574 unique applicants to be placed for the 2026 academic year.
“The above translates to 175,792 unique applicants with complete applications for grade 1 and 182,782 unique applicants with complete applications for grade 8,” Mabona said.“Unique applicants is a term to describe individual/child-specific applicants. Individual applicants had a minimum of three and maximum of five schools to apply to, hence one unique applicant can have multiple applications.”
Mabona said 51,947 incomplete applications were submitted by parents who did not submit valid proof of a home address.
Applicants with incomplete applications would not receive placement offers, he said.
Mabona said the department had identified 438 schools — 236 primary and 202 secondary — that had received 40,762 applications exceeding their capacity.
The department also provided an update on Gauteng’s readiness for the October/November National Senior Certificate (NSC) examinations.
In Gauteng, 192,745 candidates have registered to write the NSC exams. The number comprises 144,246 full-time candidates and 48,499 part-time candidates.
The department said 1,040 centres had been registered to conduct the examinations and all centres had been audited and were deemed compliant.
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