Next Tuesday at 6.50am, Olivia will leave home to begin the first leg of her three-hour daily commute. The journey will cost £35 a week and involve no less than three buses each way — assuming, of course, that everything runs smoothly.

Even for the most dedicated employee, it’s not the best way to start and finish a busy day. But for a four-year-old beginning school for the first time, it could hardly be less appropriate.

Due to over-crowding at her local primary school, that is the situation Olivia finds herself in — a situation that her mother, Melissa Stowe, is understandably furious about.

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Melissa Stowe pictured with daughter's Olivia, four, and Daisy, eight months. The family will face a three hour commute when Olivia starts school on Tuesday after her nearest - a 10min walk away - was over-subscribed

‘The first day at school is meant to be one you are excited about, but we are dreading it,’ says 22-year-old Melissa, who together with her eight-month-old daughter Daisy will accompany Olivia on the daily trip to and from school.

‘I am really worried that she will be exhausted and that she will hate the journey and not want to go.’

Melissa had wanted to send her older child to a primary school in the village of Methley, West Yorkshire, a ten-minute walk from home. But in April she was informed by the local council that Olivia could not go there because it was over-subscribed.

The same applied to two other nearby schools, meaning that in the end she was allocated a place at a school that she has to travel to via a complicated five-mile bus journey.

‘I appealed against the decision but was told that nearer schools were full and I would have to go on the waiting list,’ said Melissa, who together with her partner James Sheard, an installation engineer, does not drive.

‘It’s ridiculous. I can’t understand why there aren’t enough places — why should my daughter suffer as a result?’

The mother waits at the bus stop where she will have to catch three buses to get her daughter to school

It is a question that many exasperated parents will no doubt be asking themselves over the coming days and months.

This year, one in eight — more than 76,000 children — were turned away by their first-choice school while 22,500 did not get a place at any of their preferred schools. In some areas the situation was much worse — in London’s Kensington and Chelsea, four out of ten missed out on first-choice schools.

Other places feeling the squeeze include Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, Kent, Essex, Buckinghamshire, Hampshire, Brighton, East Sussex, Sheffield and Milton Keynes.

The reason is simple — in these areas there are too many children applying for too few places.

And it is not just those forced to accept second-best who will feel hard done-by. As schools re-open across the country next week, pupils will find themselves crammed into temporary classrooms erected on playgrounds or shoe-horned into converted gyms and rented office space.

One school in Merseyside is now so short of room it has even had to create a roof-top playground, while another is considering teaching the children in shifts — one half in the morning, the other in the afternoon.

It all means that instead of entering a small, intimate learning environment, for many four and five-year-olds their first taste of formal education will be in establishments with more than 100 pupils in each school year.

Indeed, in the past 12 months, the number of so-called ‘supersize’ primaries with more than 800 pupils has risen from 58 to 77.

At the same time the total number of infant classes exceeding the supposed top limit of 30 pupils has more than doubled to 549.

It emerged this month from the Department for Education’s statistics that six primary schools had pupils crammed into classes of over 70.

How, then, is it that the provision of places continues to fall so badly short of demand?

The answer is that successive governments have singularly failed to react to the baby boom that is now convulsing the education system. While this spike in the birth-rate is partly due to women born in the late-Sixties and early-Seventies delaying motherhood, the main driver has been the decade of open-door immigration overseen by New Labour.

Between 2000 and 2010, the numbers attending English state nursery and primary schools actually fell — from 4.3 million to 3.9 million a year. During this time, 1,000 primary schools were closed.

But at the same time, official government statistics clearly indicated that the decline in numbers would soon be dramatically reversed.

The 22-year-old's route starts at 6.50am in Methley, West Yorkshire, and ends in Allerton Bywater by 9am

Over the course of that decade, the number of births in England and Wales increased by 22 per cent. The Total Fertility Rate (TFR) — the number of children born per woman — steadily increased from 1.63 in 2001 to 2.0 in 2010. Again, immigration was one of the main drivers of this.

In 2000, 15 per cent of all births in the UK were to mothers born outside the country — in 2010, it had risen to more than 25 per cent. This is because the number of foreign-born women living here has increased, and also because they have more children than British-born women, since they are more likely to be aged 25 to 34, when fertility is at its highest.

Research by the Office of National Statistics has revealed that in 2011 the TFR was 1.84 for UK-born women and 2.21 for women born outside the UK. Women born in Romania had a TFR of 2.93, the highest of any EU country, while Polish women contributed the largest number of babies.

And it is not a trend that is likely to reverse any time soon. On Thursday, the ONS released figures that showed net migration to Britain has surged by 68,000 in the past year to 243,000.

That means that projections about future demand could already be too low.

The Department for Education has predicted that the number of pupils at primary schools will rise this decade from 4,305,000 to 4,684,000 — a growth of 8.8 per cent. The rise is equal to another 1,440 average–sized primary schools.

Much of the pressure is being felt in urban areas up and down the country, where migrants are more likely to settle.

In Sheffield, the annual birth rate has increased from 5,500 to 7,000 in the past decade. In Peterborough, the reception intake has increased from 2,100 in 2007 to 3,000 last year.

And in Bournemouth the number of children starting school leapt from 1,347 in 2006 to 1,924 last year.

The figures for London are particularly revealing as to the nature of the changing school population. While nationally, one in five primary school pupils have a first language other than English, in inner-London the figure now exceeds 50 per cent.

No clearer demonstration of all these trends — and their consequences — is to be found than at Gascoigne Primary School in Barking, East London, a borough that has seen a 60 per cent rise in the birth rate and a doubling of the foreign-born population in the past decade.

To cope with demand, in the past six years the school has had to create 13 new classrooms after pupil numbers soared by 50 per cent from 800 to 1,200.

More than 76,000 children were turned away by their first choice school this year (picture by model)

Eight mobile classrooms have been placed in the playground, with a further five permanently built. One of these is placed on ‘stilts’ above the main entrance to save space.

The primary, the biggest in the country, has lost all its playing fields and at times has had to sacrifice its music-room and library for extra teaching space.

The latest casualty is the school’s IT suite, which has had to make way for an extra dining room to accommodate Nick Clegg’s new free school meals initiative for pupils under seven. The 1,200 children are split into 39 classes, and the school, which has 150 staff, runs with military precision on a rota of lunchtimes, lessons and play.

There are three assemblies a day — two in the morning and one after lunch — because the children cannot all fit into the school hall at once.

As for the playground, it is rationed into six shifts, while lunchtime is staggered from 11.45am to 1.20pm.

Sixty different languages are spoken at Gascoigne and more than 90 per cent of pupils have English as an additional language.

One third are Eastern European and a third are African.

‘I’m not going to pretend there aren’t difficulties, but you have to overcome them,’ admits head-teacher Bob Barton, 61. ‘There is no doubt that we are overcrowded. There is no way we can take any more children.’

And it is not just London schools that are being forced to squeeze extra pupils in any way they can. At Birkdale Primary School in Southport, Merseyside, architects recently designed a play-deck on the extended roof of the 378-pupil school due to a lack of space.

Four out of ten missed out on first-choice in Kensingtona and Chelsea while Essex and Bristol also felt squeeze

And there are plans for Bristol Cathedral Choir Primary School, the city’s most over-subscribed primary, to move from its temporary base into several unused floors at the city’s central library.

That mirrors steps taken in Brighton, East Sussex, where the former Hove police station has been converted into a satellite school to accommodate 500 pupils.

For parents, of course, the main worry is that as more and more children are packed into ever-larger schools, their offspring’s education and well-being will suffer.

A survey this week by online parenting forum Netmums found that one in five parents think schools are squeezing too many children into classes.

Similar numbers told of their unease that their child might get ‘lost’ in the school system and not get the individual attention they needed.

It is a fear shared by 37-year-old Sarah Irving, whose four-year-old son Joshua will start school next month.

She and partner Ed Laptalis were confident their boy would go to their local primary school in the village of Langley, Berkshire. Indeed, to ensure this happened, last year they bought a house three-quarters of a mile from the school, which they believed would be well within its catchment area.

But this April they learned that due to exceptional demand, the catchment boundary had been moved and they had missed out by a couple of hundred metres.

Instead, the council informed them that their son had been allocated a place at another school a mile-and-a-half away — one with 180 children, or six classes of 30, starting in reception.

‘We were gutted,’ said Sarah, a manager at B&Q. ‘I’m very worried about the size of the school he is now going to have to go to — it is a very large school.

‘Joshua doesn’t like change and is quite shy with people he doesn’t know. I’m worried whether he will be able to settle in.’

It is a point echoed by Annette Davidson. She, too, failed to get her daughter, Melissa, four, into the local school she wanted.

Parents' main worry is that their offspring’s education and well-being will suffer as children are packed in

‘There were 126 applicants for just 30 places,’ said Annette, who lives in Ashton-Under-Lyne and runs an online gift business with husband Gary. ‘Of those, 13 places went to siblings, and due to the distance we live from the school we failed to qualify for the remainder.’

Instead, she was offered a place at another local primary school, which she subsequently discovered was doubling its intake at reception from 30 to 60 at the start of this school year. While the children will have two teachers, parents have been told by the school that for much of the time they will be treated as a single group.

‘I was pretty shocked,’ said Annette. ‘In my daughter’s nursery she was in a class of just 15. So to go from 15 to what is effectively 60 is a lot for her to cope with. I’m worried that she will become just a face in the crowd, a number rather than a name.

‘We’ve been trying to be upbeat about the new term, telling her it will be a big adventure, but I would definitely rather she was in a smaller class. Unfortunately, it seems we don’t have any choice, and I know there are other parents who feel the same.’

And, ultimately, that goes to the nub of the problem.

Because while the Government may claim that it is giving unprecedented sums of money to councils to cope with growing demand (£5 billion over the course of this Parliament), on the ground, parents simply cannot understand why more was not done sooner to cope with an entirely predictable problem.