"We're looking for a child's head," a man barked at little Akho Msengana, seven, who was walking home from school as darkness engulfed the Cape Town township of Mfuleni. The Grade 1 boy made a run for it and the man in the bakkie gave chase. Luckily, Msengana got away."He was so frightened he could not sleep," said his aunt, Lilitha Biko.Akho is one of about 400 children from Parliament Street Primary School on the "night shift" - so called because their school hours are from 1.15pm to 6pm.Because of the shortage of schools in the township, parents earlier this year agreed to share Bardale Primary School's premises with pupils of other schools after normal teaching hours, calling it a "platooning" system.When the Parliament Street pupils pour out of school in the evenings, they face fleets of raging taxis and speeding cars."The government is trying its best to help and I am grateful my son has an education," said one mother, who collects her son every evening."We agreed to the platooning and cannot demand that things are fixed immediately."But many parents are getting impatient.Six-year-old Endiko Somdaka's mother, Paulina, is livid."My child goes to bed past 10pm because she wants to do her homework,"' she said.Biko said the department had promised that platooning would "stop by April".At the beginning of the year, schools in the area were full and many children could not be accommodated.The community's response was to set up a school in a tent.Jessica Shelver, spokesman for Western Cape education MEC Debbie Schäfer, said the department of education had offered alternatives, such as transporting the children to other schools, but parents had insisted on sharing Bardale's premises.The department will establish a mobile school in the area soon and the departments of transport and of public works have processed an urgent request to lease land from the City of Cape Town."In the interim the platooning will continue until the new mobile school is ready," said Shelver.She said Western Cape has to cope with a yearly influx of pupils seeking an education in the province - 154891 children had arrived from the Eastern Cape in the past five years, costing the Western Cape government R1.85-billion ."Our commitment is to provide the best-quality education we can to all learners in Western Cape schools," said Shelver."The challenges of doing this within budget frameworks when we have to accommodate significant numbers of additional learners are obvious."..