News / SIC to kickstart stalled tertiary review
A SENIOR Shetland Islands Council official has been brought in to “unstick” 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 £3 to £2 million a year.
On Friday it emerged that 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.
On Friday Grant confirmed that Cree Hay had been replaced by John Smith, the SIC’s executive manager of performance and improvement.
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 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.
However several senior figures within higher education have said a business plan should have been prepared by now, one going as far as to call the process so far “an abject failure”.
The NAFC Marine Centre, an independent body, had been assisting with the review but due to the lack of progress it has since pulled out to concentrate on its own strategy to deal with impending funding cuts.
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.
“I am hoping that by this time next year we have a very firm plan and a very clear indication of when we would have a unified body in place and I would hope by this time in 2016 we can say we will have a unified college in August 2016.”
John 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.”
Smith is stepping into a new role working alongside Neil Grant in development to progress a wide range of projects, including broadband, transport, fixed links and rural resilience.
However tertiary education is the most urgent of all, partly because there are pressures coming from the University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI) and the Scottish Funding Council (SFC) to move things forward swiftly.
Smith said: “One of the problems is that we are still looking inwards on how we organise things locally, rather than creating an agenda and pursuing that with the UHI and SFC.
“They are ready to help, but we need a clear idea of what we need help with.”
Bob Cree Hay could not be contacted for comment.
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