Once you appreciate that Devon spends more every year on busing its pupils to school - 6 per cent of its total budget - than it devotes to special education (4 per cent), you begin to realise the scale of the problems in running a large rural authority.

The cost and energy required to transport 22,000 pupils every day means that headteachers here are raiding standards fund money - cash earmarked by Whitehall for activities specified by government - to pay for the basic running of their schools.

Ray Tarleton, head of South Dartmoor Community College and chairman of the county’s secondary heads, explains: “We now receive pound;60 less for every secondary school pupil than in the early 1990s. We have never recovered from the (government-imposed) cuts of the mid-1990s.

“A county like Devon does not have funding per-pupil as high some authorities because of the wretched area cost-adjustment issue. For some reason it is assumed that you need more money to run a school in Essex or Berkshire than you do in Devon.”

The pound;15 million transport bill - “It’s taking money out of things that are directly of educational benefit,” says Tony Smith, Devon’s director of education - is the result of legislation passed when cars were a rarity that requires authorities to provide for pupils under eight travelling more than two miles to school (three miles for the over-eights).

“The funding formula is wrong,” says Mr Smith, “because it does not adequately recognise our reality. We are lobbying for change but it’s not one of the Government’s big concerns: the problem is not acute and it affects rural rather than urban areas.”

The pound;4m adjustment Devon receives from Whitehall to cope with its geographical spread is spent on subsidising its small village schools: one-third of its 323 primaries have a roll under 100; one in six has fewer than 50 pupils .

Closure is not an option where the school building is the focal point of the local community. “We have to consider the sustainability arguments very carefully,” says Mr Smith, who believes the authority has a wider role than simply education.

“It costs just over pound;100,000 to run one of our smallest schools. Close it and you’ve still got to provide the education for the children in the next village school. You’ve got to make the teacher redundant, probably got to build an extension on the neighbouring school to cope. Then there’s the ongoing cost of transport. Add all that lot up and we might save pound;20,000 per school; pound;20,000 in a budget of pound;260 million you’re not going to see. The argument is a false one.”

Devon is the largest authority in the South-west despite having lost Plymouth (population 250,00) and Torbay (130,000), which became unitary authorities in 1998. From Lynmouth in the north to Plymouth is 70 miles as the crow flies but that’s crossing Exmoor and Dartmoor which dominate the county. It has 8,000 miles of roads, characteristically lined by high hedges. Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote of “stumbling down steep dark lanes”. It certainly can seem another world once you stray off the main roads.

This is Swineshire, the fictional county that Ted Wragg satirised in his columns in The TES in the 1970s and 1980s.

“There were about 91 Tories on the county council, three Labour, three Liberals and three independents,” Ted recalls. “The education committee, on which I was a university rep, reflected that. Every time they proposed anything, a host of Tory hands would go up and that was it.”

It was also a time of colourful characters, not least the deputy chair of education, Vera Fraser-James.

In 1983, when they were appointing a new deputy director of education, Ted bumps into her and asks after progress.

“They’re all too small,” she replies. “The one thing you need as a deputy director is authority and that means being tall.”

A week later, the pair meet again and Ted asks if the matter has been settled.

“We’ve appointed Roy Pryke,” Mrs Fraser-James announces. Pryke, who later went on to be a very successful director of education in Kent, is a man of many talents but height is not one of them. “But,” Ted exclaims, “he’s not exactly tall.”

“I know,” says Vera, “but he was the biggest.”

Today things are different. The Liberals and the Lib Dems have forced their way on to the political agenda. The latter were in control until June when the council became hung. But instead of deadlock there is a new spirit of consensus. “It’s a bit like the power-sharing in Northern Ireland - except this is working,” says Ted Wragg, now professor of education at Exeter University. “The politicians of all sides have shown amazing maturity.”

The councillor with responsibility for schools is a Conservative, John Hart, a caravan park owner who has been involved in local politics since 1963. He is concernd with efficiency but the word “cuts” does not feature in his vocabulary. He was returned to the county council only in June after four years in the political wilderness which he spent helping to rationalise the schools appeal system in the north and east of the county.

He has trenchant views on the boom in the infant population that the county is experiencing, particularly in the north. “Too many 50-year-olds marrying their 30-year-old second wives and moving in to start their new families,” he says.

Devon is faced with an expanding schools population: over the next two years 1,300 families will be arriving in Exeter with the Met Office, which is moving its headquarters from Bracknell, Berkshire. Another 500 should be arriving as South-west Rail moves from Bristol. Two new “settlements” of 3,000 homes each are to be built near Exeter and Plymouth to cope with the influx.

Some of their children will probably find themselves in small two-teacher village schools. “This is the staple of the English education market,” says Ted Wragg. “They are the real heroes and heroines of our system.”