I should provide a little more detail for others struggling with similar issues. The workaround I adopted was to add a "magic header" entry to the MIME type application/x-shellscript within the Tools>Options>Environment>MIME Types so that wherever...
#!/bin/sh
...appears in the first few characters of a file, then Qt Creator considers the file to be application/x-shellscript.
N.B. as detailed in the previous post, if you leave "Use fallback location" selected, then highlighting fails, and there's no way to manually associate a file with a highlighting scheme to get over these issues in automated loading.