YESTERDAY, at Campsie View School in Lenzie, I launched the most fundamental national consultations in decades on the future of Special Educational Needs in Scotland. The Herald, to its credit, turned up and so did the local paper. I did a single interview on QFM.

To put it another way, special educational needs is not a sexy media subject. Out of sight is largely out of mind. Yet the quality of life for thousands of families in Scotland is crucially affected by the extent to which education authorities respond to the very particular and often extremely challenging needs of their children.

We start from the premise that every child has potential and is entitled to expect that the education system will help him or her develop it to the full. The basic question is whether that objective is being delivered to children with special educational needs, in every part of Scotland.

Are individual needs being identified early enough? Is there enough awareness among teachers of how to deal with them? Are there still schools where complex needs are mistaken for either stupidity or obstinacy? How effectively does the speech and language therapy service operate? Where does the balance of argument lie, between mainstream and special schooling? How can the involvement of parents be improved?

There is no shortage, either, of questions or of anecdotal evidence that not all of the answers are particularly reassuring. I know from personal experience that there is a great deal of ''best practice'' to be built on. However, I am equally certain that this consultation is necessary and overdue if we are to ensure that the system is as universally good as it should be.

Already, there is a good deal of contact between Scotland and other countries in the field of special educational needs. We have valuable experiences to impart and there is also much to be learned. If there are more effective teaching methods and support systems elsewhere in the world, for any particular group, then we need to know about them.

The schools consultation is one part of a three-pronged review of Special Needs provision in Scotland. Last week, I announced the appointment of Robert Beattie, community investment co-ordinator at IBM, to chair what I regard as a very important Scottish Office committee which will review and make recommendations on Post School Education and Training of Young People with Special Needs.

The Beattie Committee includes an extremely high-quality range of relevant expertise and I expect its report, sometime next year, to be a landmark

document. Post-school special needs provision has, in some parts of Scotland, been a real twilight area which rests uneasily between education and social work. This is an opportunity to sort it out and thereby open up much-improved prospects to both the immediate client group and also their families.

There can be no exceptions to the assertion that this Government is committed to offering young people high-quality education and training. There are widely varying levels of ability but the vital principle is that everyone must have the opportunity to reach his or her full potential. That, in many cases, will mean the difference between a lifetime of dependency and the chance to live and work independently.

I first became acutely aware of the importance of these post-school problems through my work as a constituency MP. Parents and carers who had handled things well throughout the school period were driven to the point of distraction by the difficulty in obtaining appropriate provision thereafter. For many, life was a constant

battle with a system which often appeared bureaucratic and inflexible. It doesn't have to be like that.

The term ''special needs'' covers a very wide range of abilities and disabilities. The Beattie Committee will look at the problems of young people who are at imminent risk of social exclusion, to use the current terminology, because of low achievement and poor basic skills. It will cover also young people who have physical disabilities, learning difficulties, or mental health problems and need support.

I have asked another committee, under the chairmanship of Professor Sheila Riddell of Glasgow University, to undertake a more specific review of special educational need provision for those with severe low-incidence disabilities. This topic gives rise to particular problems stemming from the need to plan across local authority boundaries, which were exacerbated by the reorganisation and fragmentation.

Taken together, these three initiatives will provide an extremely thorough and wide-ranging review of special needs provision in Scotland. I hope that the work which is produced over the next year will help to transform the life prospects of the next generation of young people and their families whose needs may be different from the majority but whose rights should not be accorded any lower priority.

n Brian Wilson is Minister for

Education and Industry in Scotland.