Student grant applicants will be given clearer information this year on the ability to report reduced incomes, after hundreds had to make appeals that could have been avoided.

Student grant clinics have been set up in colleges as thousands still await their grants to be paid or appeals to be finalised.

A review of the failings of the Student Universal Support Ireland (Susi) grant system will focus on problems around documentation, processing and payments, with around 7,000 eligible students still waiting for their fees and grants to be paid.

A student seeking a grant has had to submit her father’s death certificate three times to the agency set up to make applications faster and simpler, the Dáil has been told.

Almost one third of first-year college students seeking grants have still not had their application decided.

The central grants system may not be able to cope when it is extended to cover all students in the coming years, claims the head of the institute of technology sector.

The Government has had to put an extra €3m into an emergency fund to help cash-strapped students — many of whom are being forced to turn to colleges for food and rent money.

Just 13,500 of the 35,000 first-year students due a college grant will have been paid by Christmas, despite government promises of a faster, more efficient system.

About 8,000 students fewer than promised look set to get their college grants before the end-of-year deadline set three weeks ago.

The private company, the systems of which are being partly blamed for student grant delays, is taking on a further 50 temporary staff to help try and meet a target to have 33,000 applications decided by Christmas.

A better service for students was pledged but the new grants system is worse than the one it replaced, says education correspondent Niall Murray

The performance of the Education Minister Ruairi Quinn in dealing with the controversy over the processing of grant applications has been described as "abysmal" by Fianna Fáil.

Additional staff have had to be brought in as fewer than 700 students have been paid their grants so far by the new agency which Education Minster Ruairi Quinn had said would speed up the application process.

Almost 9,500 college students are due to get their first grant payments within weeks through the new online application system.

The closure of three creches by City of Dublin Vocational Education Committee, in Whitehall, Ballyfermot and Cabra, and in other VECs around the country, is caused by a complicated set of circumstances.

THE teaching union representing 70 part-time teachers who face being made to pay back thousands of euro which was wrongly paid to them has demanded an independent body examine exactly how much money is owed.