Education: The pounds 26,000 saving to make a child go 34 miles to scho ol

Nine-year-old Eileen Grant may be the most expensive pupil in Britain's state schooling system. Highland Council fears it cannot afford the pounds 26,267 a year it costs to teach her in the remote school where she is the only pupil. Louise Jury looks at the youngster's options.

Eileen Grant lives with her parents, Isabel and Arthur, on a remote Scottish estate where Mr Grant is the head keeper. The local shops and doctor are 35 miles away in Helmsdale, which is the nearest village. The mail is delivered twice a week.

For the past five years, Eileen has been taught by Mary Harris at Loch Choire primary school where she is the only pupil.

But last week Highland Council put the fate of the school on a list of 10 which face closure as it endeavours to find savings of pounds 14m. Councils throughout Britain face the dilemma of whether they can afford to keep open small schools much valued by their local communities. In England recently a proposal by Warwickshire to close many small rural schools was fiercely contested by parents.

Highland Council's education department is pounds 1.6m over budget for this financial year alone. The closure idea has to go out to consultation but the option for Eileen if it goes ahead would be a 17-mile journey to the neighbouring primary school of Kinbrace.

Isabel Grant, 49, said they had lived in their cottage for 21 years and the area needed people like them to carry on working in places others might shun as inhospitable.

They would be very worried for Eileen if she had to move schools to Kinbrace, particularly in the winter months when they were frequently cut off by snow drifts.

There were no other children left in the area, which lies more than 100 miles from Inverness, and in two years' time Eileen will be leaving to board at secondary school 50 miles away. "Couldn't they wait until then?" she said.

Mary Harris knows the hazards of bad weather. The Loch Choire estate owners have provided a cottage where she stays when the weather is too bad for her to do the 70-mile round trip home to Helmsdale.

She would not comment on the council's plans but said 17 miles was clearly a long way for a primary aged pupil to go to school. And it is that distance which might prove the sticking point for the plan.

Council spokesman Gordon Fyfe said Loch Choire primary was the only school with a single pupil, although several on the possible hit list were very small.

Providing a teacher and paying heating and book bills brought the cost of educating Eileen to pounds 26,267, against an average of pounds 1,600 to pounds 1,700 per pupil a year in the Highlands, the most remote mainland region in Europe.

But if the council agreed Loch Choire should close, there will be one more hope for Eileen - the Secretary of State for Scotland, Donald Dewar.

"Seventeen miles exceeds the normal limit so the decision would have to go to the Scottish Secretary," Mr Fyfe said. If the whole process took long enough, Eileen Grant could be a boarder by then anyway.