More than 100 furious parents caught up in the primary school places shortage grilled council officials at Kingston Guildhall last night.

Emotions ran high on the night, and amid the fraught and tense two-and-a-half hour meeting the council was reproached for their handling of the crisis and lack of communication with worried families.

Constant questions from parents about why they weren't contacted in February, when the council knew they had received a higher than predicted number of applications, were met with measured and composed responses from the council's director of children's services Patrick Leeson.

He said: "If in February I had created 200 additional places in schools in Kingston I would have not have known where to put them.

"You don't know at that point how many people are actually going to get a place because of the shakedown, and because you don't know that you don't know which preferences to use in order to put in the additional places.

"There are intelligent people working in this department, and if they could have done that they would have."

But parents reacted vocally to this response, arguing that because the council knew everybody's preference at this stage it should have been a simple task to decide where extra classrooms should go.

Other complaints included late applicants gaining an advantage through extra places becoming available at schools early decision makers were forced to rule out as unattainable', and the council failing to take into account the boost in births and house building in their figures.

Mr Leeson said the law required the council to place late applicants in the same way as everyone else, and there was no way he could say to them "go to the end of the queue".

He said that the council would include more local data, including birth and GP registrations, to supplement the projected figures on how many places are needed every year provided by the Greater London Authority.

Mr Leeson also took the opportunity to formally apologise to parents after worried mum Manisha Patel described herself as "shaking with anger" over not receiving one.

He said: "I'm extremely sorry you have had uncertainty and difficulty with the process.

"I absolutely understand that it's caused you a lot of stress and I absolutely apologise for that."

The council plans to write to parents of all four-year-olds in September to discover their probable preferences for 2009, and are looking to add six, four and three new forms of entry in the borough over the next three years.