So Daddy, what did you do during the great schools admissions crisis of 2009?

It's a question almost 300 sets of parents did not expect to be asked when they applied for infant school places last October.

Eight months on – eight months – the last pieces of the primary school place jigsaw appear to be falling into place. I'm one of the lucky 30 sets of parents whose child is to be shoehorned into her local school after the governors of Bishop Road agreed to take an extra class. Getting from there to here has been quite a journey.

Like everyone else, we hadn't seen this coming. As the snow fell back in February, more than 140 children, from Sefton Park across to Henleaze, were not offered a place at any school. Action groups quickly formed on both sides of the Gloucester Road – BPAC (Bristol Schools Primary Admissions Crisis) and LAPSE (Local Access to Primary School Education). Sadly, the best name of all, Sort Out Our Primaries (SOUP), was discarded.

But once we started digging through council archives, one thing became very clear: we hadn't seen this coming, but the council had, and had chosen to do nothing about it. Live birth data from the NHS, GP surgeries registrations and pre-schools bursting at the seams painted a clear enough picture. Some officers continue to argue this year is a "blip", a one-off. We'll see.

Either way, I wondered, why on Earth sail so close to the wind? Train companies get away with the minimum number of carriages, but how can you possibly contemplate doing this with schools?

Initial meetings with council officers were utterly dispiriting. They pointed out there was enough capacity across the city, but the spaces were in the wrong places. This reminded me of Eric Morecambe playing Grieg's piano concerto – you'll remember he played all the right notes but not necessarily in the right order: the spaces were in the wrong places.

Why does this matter? Because of the age of the children involved. These aren't secondary school children who can take a bus to a school, they're tots, many of whom will barely be four when they start school.. Anonymous officials talked candidly about putting on school buses to transport children en masse to schools five miles away; they kindly suggested they'd pay for taxisfor the children and one adult, ignoring the fact that all this was simply wrong.

Of greatest concern was the obvious lack of appetite to fix things. Officers quoted procedure and process by heart and cited a 1,001 reasons for inertia, but no solutions. An old farming friend of mine has a saying: think long and hard before you wrestle with a pig, you'll both get muddy and the pig will like it. I got the increasing impression that the council had seen this all before and I worried that they would see us off too.

We were, they implied, middle-class parents who did not want to mix their treasured children, chiselled from finest porcelain, with the great unwashed, less they got chipped and became damaged good. No one I know held such a simplistic view. One of the things that makes me angriest about this whole fiasco is that many people living in communities around mediocre schools also do not want their children to go to those schools – just look at the statistics of where undersubscribed schools are located. But it's the squeaky wheel that gets oiled: we put a campaign group together where others did not, and the council had to react.

Fortunately, we were to see the best, as well as the worst, of the local authority.

This is not intended as a political point, but the sea change came when power within the council shifted from Labour to the Lib Dems. The Lib Dems are not whiter than white: the schools crisis has been bubbling up for more than 10 years and they've had opportunities in the past to nail it. This time though, the mess was so big and, I should point out, local elections so imminent, that they gnawed away at the issue like a dog with a bone.

Clare Campion-Smith, the new cabinet member for children and young people's services, happened to have something we'd found lacking in other politicians and some officers – a moral belief that what had happened was plain wrong. Our optimism was slightly dimmed though, when four days after announcing it was her intention for every child to be able to walk to a local school, she admitted at a meeting to being "worried" about whether that could be achieved.

Negotiations were swiftly set up with schools across the city to see if they would take on extra classes. In the end, 13 have agreed to do so. Even then, mediocrity threatened to jeopardise everything. Requests to schools asking them to consider the not inconsiderable matter of expanding at short notice were pinged off by email; some learnt of the request almost as a fait accompli through the pages of this newspaper: it was a textbook exercise in getting people's backs up.

Some schools made it clear they had initially been given a "Ryanair" offer – ie no-frills, just the children and the minimum infrastructure, and expected to make up the rest as they went along. The long-standing mutual contempt between many schools and the council was obvious. Both parties voiced this state of affairs to us, in the middle. 'Have you forgotten we're dealing with young children?,' I wanted to say.

Certain episodes stand out, not necessarily for the right reasons. At a key meeting, one of the officers tasked with dealing with expansion fell asleep; plans were made for a mass stunt of 40-plus parents with children and siblings queuing up at bus stop on the Gloucester Road at rush hour 8.15am; and while we'd anticipated perfectly reasonable opposition from some parents at the schools in question we were taken aback by the depth of wild hate that emerged from a minority. This is children we're talking about, I kept telling myself.

And then there was the question of what we were fighting for. I personally felt – and still do – that my daughter is way too young to go to school. In an ideal world, I would hold her back a year; but in the real world this is impractical. Not only do work pressures and childcare make such a move difficult, but the council, again, is unhelpful. By law you can hold your child back a year, but in doing so, the admissions policy will consign her to the bottom of all lists for school places.

So is that it? For most of us, yes. But the saga continues for those on the periphery of Bishop Road School. Procedure will out, it seems. Under the Byzantine application process some people will be offered two places at expanded schools while others will get offered neither.

It will be interesting to watch how next year unfolds, when a similar number of applications are expected to deluge the admissions department. Mrs Campion-Smith has made clear her determination to avoid a repeat of this year's circus. But it's not just about fixing school capacity, it's also about fixing the culture of the council's education department. If you are a parent with a child due to enter a primary school in the autumn of 2010 I'd form your action group right now.