Frustrated parents have been left high and dry waiting for their child's school place - after email notifications failed to arrive.

Hundreds of families across Medway who had chosen to be notified of their child's secondary school allocation by email ended up going to bed not knowing if their child had gained their all-important first choice.

Medway Council's computer system was said to have crashed at around 5pm yesterday, meaning none of the about 1,500 emails were sent.

And the admissions website went into meltdown because of a high volume of parents logging on at the same time.

Angry families have been telling us how annoyed they were that the email system failed.

One reader commented: "It is upsetting for our children when they are expecting to hear on a certain day where they will be going, to not find out.

"Especially when most of their friends will be going to school tomorrow already knowing. This is a big deal in an 11-year-old's life and an extra day can seem like a lifetime to them. I don't think its acceptable in this day and age for these things to go wrong."

Parents were able to apply on paper or online, with more than 58 per cent of families using the internet after a publicity campaign by Medway Council.

Those who applied online were supposed to receive the news electronically on Tuesday afternoon.

Offers of places for September will start landing on doormats of those who applied by post from Wednesday.

A Medway Council spokesman said: "Due to problems experienced with a computer system that is provided to a number of councils, we were unable to to send out emails yesterday afternoon announcing secondary school places to parents.

"The high volume of parents trying at the same time also meant there were some intermittent problems accessing the admissions website.

"Letters were also sent by first class post yesterday to all parents informing them of their child's school place and we would ask people to bear with us while we work on getting the emails sent out.

"We would like to apologise for the inconvenience this has caused."

The admissions website was working again on Wednesday morning and all parents who have applied online can log on at www.medway.gov.uk/onlineadmissions with their password to find details of their child's place.