Education
With regard to her Department’s online registration system:
(1) What monetary investments have gone into the development and upgrading of the online registration system over the past five financial years;
(2) in relation to its operational capacity, (a) how many applicants can the website accommodate at any given time and (b) how has this improved over the past five calendar years;
(3) how many people have applied online in the calendar years of (a) 2017, (b) 2018, (c) 2019, (d) 2020, (e) 2021, and (f) 2022 to date;
(4) what plans are in place to make the online registration more accessible to applicants without sufficient resources?
- No monetary investments were made. The system has been developed ‘in-house’ by the Centre for E-Innovation (CEI) in the Department of the Premier.
- There are no restrictions on the number of users.
- The system has improved year on year. In order to strengthen the system and the user experience, the CEI has increased the random-access memory (RAM), added additional virtual central processing units (vCPUs) to manage the application activity, and made other technical adjustments. However, because the system runs on CEMIS (which is managed by the CEI), it will always be subjected to the capacity, rules and regulations of the State Information Technology Agency (SITA).
- The system was piloted in 2017 and 2018. The recordkeeping of applications was not done, as the pilot’s focus was on clearing all possible application challenges and making the system and the application process as user-friendly possible.
2017 for 2018: piloting the experiment with 300 schools
2018 for 2019: piloting with 500 participating schools
2019 for 2020 = 165 398 registered users
2020 for 2021 = 158 851 registered users
2021 for 2022 = 162 860 registered users
2022 for 2023 = 87 947 current cycle registered users
- The WCED does understand that some parents/caregivers are restricted in terms of accessibility to equipment. That is why the WCED has arranged for parents to apply via our district offices, or the pop-up stalls arranged by the WCED at shopping malls and schools. Some schools have communicated to parents that they will be opening their labs for parents to apply. The pop-up stalls will assist parents directly to apply using our IT equipment, and paper-based applications will be made available if queues get too long, which will be captured online by our staff.
As of 6 April 2022, 96 304 unique learner applications have been captured via the system, and 10 716 through schools, districts offices and pop-up stalls.
