Gauteng online admissions for Grades 1 and 8 begin, placement offers sent via SMS

MEC Matome Chiloane confirmed the 2025 online admissions placement period for grades one and eight in Gauteng began on September 16 and will continue for the remainder of the year until all learners are placed.

Parents and guardians with complete applications for grades one and/or eight will receive placement offers via SMS notifications sent to the cellphone numbers provided when registering the applications.

Within seven days of receiving a placement offer, the parents/guardians must log on to www.gdeadmissions.gov.za using their login credentials to accept a placement offer as final or provisionally accept an offer, which means the offer is accepted while awaiting other offers.

Note that when a parent accepts an offer from a school as final, the learner is placed at that school. Placement offers accepted as final cannot be reversed. Parents who applied to more than one school are encouraged to accept offers from the maximum of five schools they selected during the application period.

Accepting an offer will allow for more possible offers to choose from, where available, in your selection of schools while maintaining your placement. If your next placement offer is accepted while awaiting other offers, your previous offer will no longer be available.

Quick recap

The 2025 online admissions application period for grades one and eight in Gauteng ran from July 11 to August 14, and the system closed with 828,364 applications:

• Grade One: 353,409

• Grade Eight: 474,955.

These applications were submitted by 344,890 unique applicants (individual learners to be placed). From the 344,890 unique applicants:

• Complete applications: 325,858

• Incomplete applications: 19,032.

Placement offers

SMSs will be sent out continually from September 16 until all learners are placed. This means not all applicants will receive an SMS on the first day of the placement period, but parents/guardians who completed their application can expect an SMS with a placement offer anytime from September 16 and throughout the year.

If parents and guardians have not received an SMS, there is no need to panic because applicants are welcome to use their credentials to log on to www.gdeadmissions.gov.za to check if a placement offer was issued.

Should an SMS state that your child has been placed in Grade One or Grade Eight at a certain school, this is regarded as a successful placement to the mentioned school. There will be no need for a parent/guardian to access the system to accept an offer in that regard because the child would be placed at the mentioned school.

High-pressure schools

The Department of Education has identified schools that received an overwhelming number of applications which exceed the capacity of learners that they can accommodate:

• 292 primary schools are regarded as high-pressure schools and

• 277 secondary schools are regarded as high-pressure schools.

Hoërskool President High School received 2,287 new applications with a capacity of 440; Sir John Adamson High School – 2,179 applicants with a 460 capacity, and Alberton High School received 2,900 applicants with a capacity of 210.

Source: The Citizen