A five-year-old girl is at the centre of a tug of war between her feuding separated parents over who she should live with and where she should go to school. But now a judge has ruled she will live with her mother and start grade one this week at a school in Umhlanga, TimesLIVE reports.

KZN High Court (Pietermaritzburg) Judge Rob Mossop, who heard an urgent application brought by both parents last week, said the urgency was self-created because both had known for a long time that the child was due to start her formal education at the beginning of the year.

However, he said, because the matter involved the best interests of a child, he had agreed to hear it and make a same-day ruling.

Mossop said neither parent had demonstrated they truly had the best interests of their child at heart.

The arrangement when the couple separated was that they share the care of the child and she spend one week with the father and the next with the mother. Last year, she was enrolled by her father at a pre-primary school in Howick, where she only attended every second week.

Her mother home-schooled her but enrolled her at Atholton Primary School in Umhlanga for the 2023 academic year.

'The child needs a permanent home and must attend school as close as possible to her home,’ Mossop said. ‘The parties seem willing to make any allegation that has the effect of casting the other in a bad light. It is difficult to understand how they believe that this is in the best interests of the child.’ 

The judge said it was ‘bizarre’ that the father had enrolled the child in a school last year when she could only attend every second week.

‘It is difficult to understand what benefit that could possibly hold for her ... it must have been confusing ... she would constantly be behind her fellow pupils, which may have affected her self-confidence.’

According to the TimesLIVE report, he agreed with submissions by the mother that this was a strategy to strengthen the father’s position in the forthcoming battle over where the child should live and attend school.

He said while there had in recent years been a move away from what had been a general ‘maternal preference rule’, given the circumstances and the personalities involved in this case, he believed it was in the best interests of the child to grant primary residence to the mother and that the child be enrolled at the Umhlanga school.

However the father must be given as much contact as possible.

Full TimesLIVE report