Bristol City Council's education officials have been rightly criticised for the school admissions fiasco of last year.

In short, the report into the debacle effectively says that one hand did not know what the other was doing.

What remains remarkable is that an authority which has overseen this process year after year could suddenly get it so badly wrong.

The fact is that the numbers of children who will need school places in any year is surely relatively easy to discover.

If nothing else, the council could check with pre-school groups and nurseries to get a rough figure.

Merely sending out posters to these groups and waiting for parents to respond is frankly leaving too much to chance.

Of course there will always be unexpected or unknown factors.

But in themselves they did not account for the problems of last year.

This was simply a situation that was very badly managed.

What is important is that lessons have been learned from it.

And we will know very shortly whether that is the case.

Surely the council cannot get into the same mess two years running.

If there are problems then it is the system which needs to change.

For parents need to have faith in the way it works.

But, given the events of last year, there must now be a lot of anxious mums and dads across the city waiting for news of their children's first school places.