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Stanley Mushava Features Correspondent —
The Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education last week migrated enrolment for Form 1 boarding places to a new website. However, only one day into registration, the website (emap.co.zw) went down, forcing the ministry to indefinitely push the application deadline which had been initially set for Sunday.

The ministry has deployed its provincial offices to allay fears over the malfunctioning website while its technology team is frantically seized with getting the platform up again.
Only 24 000 boarding places are available countrywide while 332 549 pupils sat for Grade 7 examinations this year. According to the permanent secretary in Primary and Secondary Education, more than 5 000 applicants had managed to register during the early hours of the website on Saturday before it slowed down and finally gave up.

Technicians were still racing against the sun to troubleshoot the problem at the time of going to press. Feedback ranged from frustrated applicants seeking answers on how to go around the hurdles, to sceptics questioning the sustainability of the new enrolment platform, and outright flaming.

On Monday, scores of parents took turns to submit their children’s details on printed forms for ministry staff to manually enter into the e-form once the system is up.

Parents inundated the ministry with calls seeking clarification on the way forward and were likewise told to dictate their children’s particulars to staffers over the phone for manual entry.

Primary and Secondary Education permanent secretary Dr Sylvia Utete-Masango spoke to the education segment of The Herald Review to inform concerned guardians on the way forward.

UTETE MASANGO

“We cannot punish the parents so a new deadline will be advised later. Once the system is running they should be able to log on and register,” Dr Utete-Masango said.

“Parents also need to understand that the e-form is just for boarding school enrolment. For day school, the children just go to the respective schools to register,” she said.

Government needs to dismantle barriers to connectivity and allow rural students on the lee-side of the digital divide a fair chance at admission into their dream schools.

Arising developments must reach parents countrywide with necessary clarity, and the registration period extended to accommodate exhaustive communication.

The permanent secretary said rural applications would not be prejudiced by the new system since they can register at their local primary schools.

“Registration for Grade 7 for the past three years has been conducted online. The majority of students are from rural schools and they have been able to register.

“What we then say is we might have situations where some parents are not able to log in. They should go to the school where the student wrote his or her Grade 7,” Dr Utete-Masango said.

“Should they fail to get assistance from there, they go to the cluster school and get assistance there. All cluster schools have connectivity. There is really no excuse for failing to use the technology,” she said.

All the same, the ministry will need to keep parents up-to-date with regards to the status of the on-off system to allow everyone a fair chance. Schools will need to be proactive to ensure that students with parents who are not tech-savvy (and these are many) get to apply on time.

Traditionally, boarding schools autonomously administered entrance tests to select Form 1 students. Parents would take their children to write the tests at different schools just to hedge their bets, in case they failed to get the place of their choice.

The ministry repealed the system last year arguing it was a profiteering excuse by secondary schools since the Grade 7 public examinations set by Zimsec were basis enough for selecting applicants. Schools also asked parents to pay non-refundable applications fees which could not always be accounted for.

A day was set around this time last year on which schools concurrently selected prospective first formers but minor problems were reported. In 2016, enrolment is now centrally coordinated by the ministry’s online system whose take-off flaws the permanent secretary said will be progressively outgrown.

To register, applicants need to log on to emap.co.zw from a connected device, sign up for a new account, redirect to the home page and sign in to fill application fields.

On signing up, they will be required to fill in their centre number, candidate number and date of birth as they appear on the Grade 7 results slip and select the option to confirm that they have been cleared by their former school.

On the next form, prior details are displayed but applicants are required to go to the last four text fields and type their mobile number, email (not compulsory), choose password of their choice, confirm it and register their account.

Once done with account registration, prospective first formers will be required to sign in from the home page using their centre number, candidate number and password as previously provided and select the option to apply for a Form 1 place.

The system requires parents to apply to three schools of their choice. In each case, they will be required to select a province and a district after which a list of schools in the particular district will be displayed for them to choose one and click apply.

The process is to be repeated three times to meet the requisite number of schools. After completing registration, they can check the status of their application online.

On Monday, the status was pending for the few who managed to register before the system went down. From the initial communication, Monday was the day when successful applicants would be notified which schools they would have been admitted to.

As it stands, school heads have not yet chosen their students because the ministry is waiting for everyone to complete registration when the system resurrects. Once a school picks a student, the system will indicate that he or she is now unavailable for other schools. The criterion for selection are the Grade 7 results.

Despite the ongoing hurdles, Dr Utete-Masango said the system was designed to allow parents the convenience of applying from their homes.

“For the first time, parents do not have to go to the respective boarding schools looking for places. They can now do it in the comfort of their homes,” the permanent secretary said.

“Just like any new system, it is bound to have some teething problems here and there. But I can safely say when the system was rolled out on Saturday morning, it worked perfectly well,” she explained.

“The system was very fast when the first batch of over 5 000 registered on Saturday. It was only on Sunday afternoon that we had people calling to say the system was not responding and our ICT officers have since been looking into the problem.

“In one hour after the system slowed down, we had only 100 who had successfully registered. The ICT officers have been trying to check what the problem could have been and whether there was any disturbance outside the building,” she said.

The permanent secretary said the new system was definitely here to stay to protect parents’ wallets from profiteering schools who raised their Christmas money from entrance tests.

“A number of policy changes have been entered to the advantage of the parents. Grade 7 results are public examination results. For one to go to A-Level or any tertiary institution, they use your O-Level results. Why should it be different when Grade 7 is also a national exam? Why should they doubt a public examiner?” she queried.

“That is the argument the minister put forward. And there was no need. It was just fundraising. The ministry put an end to that. Now schools do not select on the basis of entrance tests but public examinations.

“Last year, it was one day. Again, it was a question of avoiding profiteering and having parents move from one school to another and we evaluated that. We called the National Association of Secondary Heads (NASH) to evaluate the development with them.

“Most of the secondary school heads were quite happy with that arrangement. Generally, they said although it had loopholes here and there it was much better on the whole and this was now an improvement from last year,” she said.

The permanent secretary said there was no need for parents to fall over each other for boarding places because there are many day schools which operate just fine.

She said some parents may need to consider the latter as an economical choice, with boarding schools requiring fees upfront and naturally demanding higher fees.

“It should not look like it is a must that everyone must first of all look for boarding school when there are day schools that are equally good. All boarding schools countrywide have capacity for 24 000 and the number that wrote Grade 7 this year is 332 549,” the permanent secretary said.

“Against that number, we can’t accept everyone to be accommodated in boarding schools otherwise day schools will close shop. Take Glen View 1, Glen View 2 — these are high schools with an enrolment of 3 000 and 2 800.

“The majority of schools here in the urban areas are day schools which must also enrol at full capacity,” she said.

However, the same cannot be said of rural pupils some of whose potential is underutilised due to the scarcity of necessary resources such as adequately furnished science laboratories, textbooks, information technology, sports infrastructure and arts instruction.

For most of these students, the only recourse to actualise their potential are local, usually church-run boarding schools. Proper handling of the new enrolment system, anchored on effective and exhaustive communication, will facilitate their upward mobility.
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