This year’s national education budget has prompted concerns that the most vulnerable of South Africa’s children could once again disappear from the country’s priorities.

Three staff members at the Medical University of South Africa who blew the whistle on alleged high-level mismanagement at the university say they are now the victims of management’s revenge. Medunsa denies that any victimisation has occurred.

About half the country’s adults have less than nine years of schooling, and three million no education at all. But there has been “no significant progress in adult literacy since the end of the apartheid era”and adult basic education receives less than 1% of the education budget.

The government’s ability to implement its new school curriculum effectively is again under interrogation. This follows Minister of Education Kader Asmal’s quiet announcement that implementation of the Further Education and Training Curriculum will be delayed until 2006

The Khayelitsha community has taken matters into its own hands following the exclusion of children from state schools. The People’s Power Secondary School has registered 1 800 students in just one month

Outdated and dysfunctional government policy on transport subsidies for schoolchildren has emerged as another factor plaguing the attempts of poor families to ensure education for their children. Inadequate subsidies school fees and other expenses that deny children education.

Flagrant violations of the government’s school admissions policy continued to plague parents and their children this week as schools in five provinces opened, according to education bodies now monitoring the admissions process.

Few of the schoolchildren whom the government’s policy on school fees is intended to benefit qualify for exemption in practice. And school funding policies that are supposed to redress apartheid-era inequities serve to privilege historically advantaged schools.

”Direct interference with evidence and witnesses” in the inquiry into her performance finally toppled Norma Reid Birley from the vice-chancellorship of the University of the Witwatersrand, the Mail & Guardian has learned.

Schoolchildren are being kicked off school buses during the current exam period because provincial education departments have scrapped some transport subsidies. And certain schools are now illegally refusing to register children whose parents cannot prepay fees for next year.