A BASINGSTOKE school that suffered a classroom crisis last year now has three new temporary buildings to ease its overcrowding problem.

And Brighton Hill Community College is pressing ahead with plans for a £4million sixth form building - a first for Basingstoke - in a bid to permanently deal with the pleasant, but pressing, problem caused by the school's popularity.

Last June, The Gazette exclusively revealed that staff were having to teach students in the canteen and library because there were three more classes of pupils than there were rooms for.

Despite the space problems, the school has maintained the strong performance that helps make it so popular. It is ranked the second-best performing state school in the Basingstoke area for achieving five GCSE grades at A* to C and inspectors rated it as "good" in the latest Ofsted report.

David Williams, head of mathematics, said the new classrooms have improved the quality of education.

"There are 10 maths teachers in the department," he said. "Until we had these new rooms, we only had nine rooms and we had to go from room to room to room."

"It's much better, academically, than having to teach in a non-specialist classroom or a dining room."

The students also like the new rooms. Year 9 student Carys Murdock, 14, said: "There's much more space to move - you don't feel so cramped."

Headteacher David Eyre said: "This first step is merely to ease the acute accommodation problem we have because we are highly over-subscribed."

The next step, he said, is to develop a new sixth form building, which would create teaching space that, when not being used for teaching students aged 16 to 18, would ensure there were enough rooms to provide a long-term solution to the overcrowding in the 11 to 16 age group.

Architects have drawn up plans to squeeze the two-storey building, which will cost about £4million, between the existing school buildings and the sports field.

Mr Eyre said the sixth form would have the international baccalaureate - a broader qualification than the A-level - as its core option, to provide an alternative, rather than competition, to Queen Mary's College.

He is in discussions with Hampshire County Council and the Learning and Skills Council in a bid to get their backing for the plan, and is happy to collaborate with other schools.

"We need to win the argument that there's a need in Basingstoke for an alternative post-16 provision," he said. "We have got a very good college but what we don't have is a school-based sixth form. It's an ambitious project which fits well with the general ethos of Brighton Hill."