You should have seen it coming – that's the message to Bristol City Council over the primary school places crisis.

The council asked a team of consultants to look at why 300 families faced months of uncertainty until 12 schools agreed at late notice to take extra pupils in temporary classrooms from September.

It was an expensive error by the council - costing £1.3 million to put right - and today the report says it could have been anticipated.

The report, from Cambridge Education, said although some areas, particularly in London, had experienced unexpected population rises, this was not the case in Bristol. "The council's own projections from three to four years ago have consistently indicated a shortfall in the number of places at reception in certain parts of north and east-central Bristol," it said.

Although the shortage of places for 2009 was apparent in September 2008, no action was taken until the turn of the calendar year, the report said.

"Recognition of the scale of the problem and delays in organising solutions to the problem weakened the council's position in negotiating a successful outcome with the schools concerned and led to higher costs being incurred than might otherwise," it said.

The problems came to light at the end of January, shortly after the departure of the head of children's services Heather Tomlinson. Within weeks, the minority Labour administration that had been running the council decided to quit. This left a new director, Annie Hudson, and a new Liberal Democrat cabinet to sort out the difficulties, which took them until May.

The consultants criticised the council on several fronts, including:

Lack of discussion with head teachers;

Uncertainty of admissions officers about their roles and responsibilities;

Inconsistent information;

Lack of use of local knowledge on population changes;

Inadequate written information for parents.

They said school admissions and school place planning were split between two divisions of the council's children's services department, meaning that frontline staff, although "patient and polite" were "stressed and not well-briefed".

The report said the decision not to offer 300 on-time applicants school places as promised in January was a contravention of the council's co-ordinated admissions scheme, which "may have been legal but was not within the spirit of the legislation."

And it commented that "the focus on places and buildings is diverting attention from the issue of standards in schools."

The report made 28 recommendations to improve the situation for applicants for 2010 and beyond, all of which have been accepted by the council. Ms Hudson, Bristol's strategic director for children, young people and skills, said the Cambridge Education team had carried out a comprehensive, objective and searching analysis of what the city needed to do to improve its school place planning and admissions systems.

"The recommendations are helpful and work is already moving forward in a number of areas to improve the way we plan school places and handle admissions," she said.

For 2010, for the first time, admissions staff have written to the parents of all potential reception class pupils registered at city GP surgeries to tell them about the need to apply for school places.

The number of applications received by the October 23 deadline was up eight per cent on a year ago, at 4,557.

The Cambridge Education report will be considered by councillors at the children's services scrutiny commission next Monday.