Hi Maleda, I work for OKO who are one of the AdSense partners so I can't really give unbiased feedback on the first part of your question. I would like to throw some light on this part though:

"Is there a minimum number of visitors/pageviews required to be accepted into a programme? "

The Partner Programme is a programme to acquire and certify partners. There is no single programme that is rolled out to publishers. Partner Certification is more of a quality mark that the description of a product or service offered. Each partner company has their own offering and they do differ quite a bit. Between the various partners I think that there is something for publishers of most sizes.