Malky Mackay has begun a four-day campaign to garner support for the Scottish Football Association's Project Brave.

The SFA performance director is meeting clubs to discuss proposals initially drawn up by a working group featuring some of Scotland's biggest clubs and other stakeholders in youth football.

The governing body aims to reduce the number of academies included in its main youth programme from 29 to 16 and roughly halve the 2,500 young players involved in order to focus resources on those regarded as the best.

Plans for a two-tiered section of elite academies have come under fire from some clubs, most notably Motherwell, who believe they are a threat to their future as the best schoolboys would opt to move to clubs in the top division.

SFA chief executive Stewart Regan claimed that interpretation was a misconception but admitted there would be two tiers.

In an internal interview posted on the SFA website, Regan said: "The eight is a misnomer. There is no initial set of eight and second set of eight. There will simply be the successful clubs that qualify through the bid document and become Scotland's elite academies.

"Currently we have 29 academies in Scotland, and that's for a population of 5.5million people, and around 2,500 elite players in the system.

"When you look at Germany, and we have done in some detail, in terms of what they call Das Reboot, when the DFB got together with the Bundesliga to restructure their performance strategy, they ended up with 54 academies for a country of 88 million people.

"They focused on the very best and we know we need to focus on the very best players and the very best academies with the limited resources we have.

"So the recommendation from the working group was to have no more than 16 academies in Scotland that would be defined as elite. And when the group decided how those academies would be structured when it comes to playing games, programmes against each other, they decided it would be much more efficient and effective to have two tiers of eight teams."

Other complaints include claims the criteria for judging academy success are flawed, for example Premiership clubs get the same credit for players appearing on loan in League Two as they do for their own first teams.

Regan says resources will be focused on the top academies but also claims those missing out will still be funded.

"At the moment we spend over £2million on our academies and it would be our intention, with the board's approval, that the entire funding programme would be put towards a small number of academies," he said.

"Those clubs that perhaps don't make the grade and don't achieve the success criteria, we are not looking to remove money from those academies. They won't be audited or verified or have to achieve the standards of other academies but they will be allowed to carry on running their academies and we will be asking them to do additional programmes."

The strategy - which the SFA hopes to launch in the summer - would also incorporate greater use of the loan system, the creation of an under-18 league and a return to reserve football, all attempts to allow young players better access to competitive football.