A senior Shetland Islands Council official has been brought in to kick start a review of tertiary education in the isles that has ground to a halt.
Council and education insiders have complained that eight months after the complex review was launched there are still no signs of any plans for a way forward.
Last October the council agreed to look at ways of merging the Lerwick-based Shetland College and Train Shetland with the NAFC Marine Centre in Scalloway to create a single institution.
At the same time the council is hoping to reduce its spending on further and higher education by one third, down from £3million to £2million a year.
Now the council has installed a new project manager to take over the review to “inject some energy into it”.
The SIC had appointed education consultant Bob Cree Hay to manage the review process under the leadership of SIC development head Neil Grant.
Mr Grant has now confirmed that Mr Cree Hay had been replaced by John Smith, the SIC’s executive manager of performance and improvement.
Mr Grant said: “John has exceptional project management skills and I need to resource this project with the best and most appropriate resources I can muster.”
He said that Mr Cree Hay was still under contract to the council and involved in the review, and that he had “gathered together a lot of evidence and information” that could be put into a business plan.
Shetland College chairman Peter Campbell said he still hoped a business and implementation plan could be pulled together by the end of this year to keep the merger project on track.
“There is a general feeling that things have not progressed as one would have hoped, but I would hope that in another six months we could form an understanding between the two colleges about the way forward and progress fairly smoothly and quickly,” he said.
Mr Smith took over the reins of the project last week and is currently gathering together all available information to work out a way forward, but said it was a bad time of year with the colleges about to start their summer breaks.
“In October there was a relatively straight forward couple of objectives to develop a business model and to come up with an implementation plan and we have not got that yet,” he said.
“It looks like it’s stuck and I would like to unstick it.”