By Angela Harrison BBC News education reporter

This can be an anxious time for children and parents

One in ten councils in England is having problems meeting a new national deadline for issuing offers of secondary school places.

Many parents and children will have to wait up to two more weeks to find out where they will be going to school next September, the government confirmed.

Councils should be sending place offers to parents on Tuesday, but about 14 councils are facing problems.

Other parents could find they receive several offers instead of one.

Ministers brought in a common deadline this year to standardise admissions.

Local authorities were meant to liaise with each other via computers to stop people receiving firm offers from more than one school.

But computer problems will lead to some offers being delayed and in some areas - to parents receiving more than one offer after all.

'Software problems'

A spokesperson for the DfES said: "Over 90% of local authorities will be issuing all their offers on 1 March. Of the remainder, most will be able to make most or all of their offers within the next two weeks.

"The majority of parents will therefore receive offers on 1 March and won't face the uncertainty that many have experienced in the past."

Officers would not give details of the councils affected, but one which has already written to parents explaining the situation is Bracknell Forest in southern England.

Many children are going to be anxious Stephen Minshull-Beech, parent

Parents there have been told offers will be sent out by 11 March.

In a letter, the council said software problems were to blame and added that "many authorities across southern England" were experiencing problems .

One parent told the BBC News website the delay was terrible.

Stephen Minshull-Beech said: "We have all been let down. Many children are going to be anxious about this extended wait."

Martin Gocke, assistant director of education and libraries at Bracknell said the delay was necessary because of faults with the computer system it used to exchange information with other local education authorities.

"This is a national system and the software it uses has not been keeping pace with the flow of information between local education authorities. As a result, quite a few are affected," he said.

"We want to be as sure as we can be that our information is accurate before these crucial decisions are made and due to the problems with the software that means checking data from the system manually."

Wokingham and Windsor councils are also understood to be among those delaying posting offers out.

Surrey said it had been experiencing problems but hoped to get offers out on 1 March.

Stressful

The national deadline was set in a 2003 in new school admissions code of practice.

It was part of a series of changes designed, the government said, to make the admissions system simpler and fairer.

Parents are asked to put all their school preferences on one form - rather than filling in separate forms if they are applying to schools under different authorities.

The system was expected to stop the situation where one family might be holding on to several offers of school places, while others did not have one of their choice.