Almost one in ten children will miss out on their first choice primary school this year as councils struggle with a surge in demand.
About 54,000 will have to settle for another school because of pressures caused by a sustained baby boom and high levels of immigration.
One in 30 have not been allocated any of the schools their parents opted for on the application form - meaning 20,000 will start somewhere chosen by the local authority.
Missing out: One in ten pupils won't be accepted into their first choice primary school
Hundreds were still waiting for a place to be confirmed when the 2012 school year began and the situation is expected to be repeated this year.
Many will have to travel long distances to lessons, be taught in oversized classes or use makeshift classrooms.
A third of local authorities have already admitted preparing emergency measures to accommodate pupils, including using converted council offices and police stations.
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Experts warned the picture was worse than the figures suggest as they do not include local authorities in London, which are due to announce primary school allocations today.
Matt Richards, founder of School Appeals Services, said: ‘There has been a steady stream of calls but the phone will be ringing off the hook on Thursday.
'We’re predicting London will be a big problem area.’
The true extent of the problem may also have been disguised by parents making ‘tactical’ choices for their children.
Oversubscribed: About 54,000 will have to settle for another school because of pressures caused by a sustained baby boom and high levels of immigration
This includes picking a school as first choice because they fear they are highly unlikely to win a spot at a more popular and heavily over-subscribed school.
Primary school allocations are not recorded centrally. The Daily Mail contacted dozens of local authorities to provide their results and 25 responded.
The figures showed nine per cent of children will not go to their first choice school.
In Nottingham, 224 children out of 3,716 have not been given a place at any of their preferred schools this year - six per cent of the total.
Wokingham in Berkshire is close behind on five per cent, while the figure is 4.6 per cent in Bolton and 4.1 per cent in Kent.
Extraordinary pressure has been placed on the system by a spike in births that began around 2000, as well as mass immigration that began under the Labour government.
Late acceptance: Hundreds were still waiting for a place to be confirmed when the 2012 school year began and the situation is expected to be repeated this year
The National Audit Office warned last month that 256,000 extra places were needed by the start of the 2014 academic year, including 240,000 in primaries.
Official figures from the Department for Education indicate pupil numbers at state schools will swell by a million to 7.95 million by the end of the decade.
A DfE spokeswoman said: ‘We are spending £5 billion on building new schools and expanding existing good ones. We expect that 190,000 additional places will have been created by this September.
‘We want every school to be excellent so parents can be confident their child will get a high-standard education wherever they go.‘That is why we are reforming the system by improving the quality of teaching and raising standards in literacy and numeracy.’