The load shedding problem of relatively small power networks has been investigated. Procedures to develop traditional load shedding schemes are reviewed and their implementation in SimuLink/Matlab have been carried out. Simulation studies are presented to verify the performance of these schemes and the likely discrepancies between the simple theoretical design values and the actual simulated performance. The concept of an overall load shedding scheme considering the probabilistic outages of a number of most significant contingencies is proposed. The performance of such a scheme formed by combining the load shedding schemes for two different contingencies has been studied by conducting Monte-Carlo simulation of the system operation. The simulation results provide encouraging results, but more work is needed to formulate the optimal of way of developing these schemes