The Gauteng Department of Education 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 provided during registration.
Department spokesperson Steve Mabona explained that within seven days of receiving a placement offer, parents or guardians must log on to the department’s admission website to either accept the offer as final or accept it while awaiting others.
“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 were submitted — 354,916 for Grade 1 and 465,434 for Grade 8 — by 358,574 unique applicants seeking placement for the 2026 academic year.
Mabona said this translates to 175,792 unique applicants with complete applications for Grade 1 and 182,782 for Grade 8. He explained that “unique applicants” refers to individual child-specific applications, with each applicant able to apply to between three and five schools.
However, 51,947 applications were incomplete due to missing proof of home address, and those applicants will not receive placement offers.
The department identified 438 schools — 236 primary and 202 secondary — that received 40,762 applications exceeding their capacity.
Meanwhile, the department also provided an update on Gauteng’s readiness for the October/November National Senior Certificate (NSC) examinations.
A total of 192,745 candidates have registered to write the NSC exams, including 144,246 full-time candidates and 48,499 part-time candidates. The department confirmed that 1,040 centres had been registered and audited, with all deemed compliant.
