PARENTS and teachers campaigning to build a new school to overcome cramped conditions in their 145-year-old village school in Broad Chalke face their first major challenge today.

Their plans, for a £1.7m primary school to cater for an influx of more than 20 extra children when the school switches from being a first school to a primary school in September, go before planning councillors at today's meeting of Salisbury district council's western area planning committee - and officers are recommending the plans be rejected. The self-help project relies on villagers getting planning permission for six houses on land off Knighton Road, Broad Chalke, including three low-cost affordable homes for local people.

The sale of the houses and of the existing school site for four houses and the conversion of the school building into a fifth dwelling would help finance the new school.

Villagers, offered the new school site by a local landowner, are also committed to raising £300,000 themselves towards the cost. But planning officers say the school and the six houses off Knighton Road will be on land that is protected open countryside and part of the Cranborne Chase and West Wiltshire Downs area of outstanding natural beauty.

Councillors will have before them today more than 240 letters of support for the new school but also 28 letters objecting to homes being built off Knighton Road.

Campaigners will argue that they have been forced to take in extra pupils because of the two-tier education system imposed by Wiltshire county council.

They say the school site is cramped and inadequate, with no room for the two mobile classrooms the new pupils will require.

A promises auction at Manor Farm, Sutton Mandeville, on Friday in aid of the new school raised a staggering £22,000, with more money still to come in. It was organised by three parents, Jo Cuff, Sian Wild and Annabelle Bowman-Shaw, and included supper, entertainment and dancing.