At oversubscribed public schools in Peru, families have queued for long hours to secure places. The OECD reports that high-demand schools can create barriers through lengthy lines and discretionary extra fees. For the 2021 school year in Lima, the Ministry of Education introduced an advance web application from 4 to 20 January, explicitly presenting it as a way to avoid queues and crowding.
Moving applications online does not create more places at popular schools. The reform's central idea was to allocate scarce seats through a common process rather than to families able to arrive first and wait longest. It was an attempt to keep school choice from depending on how much time a parent could spend at a gate.