NB Papers P950, 951, 953, 954, 955, 956 should be considered together, for scheduling consecutively. In this paper I have analysed how management teams with a superintendent and principals in Sweden talk about pupils with special needs, special tuition and remedial classes. My approach is that I regard educational management as something that is constructed in the process of talking and negotiating. The intention of the analysis is to identify different ways of understanding the verbal interaction as a negotiation given certain conditions. Being a former head I can identify with the team and as a researcher I distance myself to the material. Equally inspired by critical hermeneutics and discourse analysis I find that superintendent as well as principals continuously define and redefine the issue and different positions as they negotiate "children in need".