With so many legal challenges - real and threatened - over the now botched merger of the Nicolson Institute and Lews Castle School in Stornoway, the Western Isles Council has taken on a new sobriquet. They call it the Writz.
The council is taking no chances this time, having had its decision to combine the two schools set aside in the Court of Session by Lord MacLean (ironically son of the famed A J MacLean, once director of education in Ross and Cromarty from which Stornoway was once governed).
Before it holds yet another consultation on the two schools, the education committee decided on Tuesday that new draft proposals are not to be left to officials.
A “member-officer working group”, including the chairman and vice-chairman, will thrash out revised plans by November 30 when the committee will decide whether they are in the right shape for public consultation.
Meanwhile some people are doing quite nicely, namely those members of the senior Nicolson management who took the redundancy shilling but have now been asked back to, er, do the job they were doing before their departure.
