A music teacher who claims that a State-funded music school has been wasting public money by paying him and his colleagues for lessons it had no students to attend, has now accused an education and training board of penalising him for whistleblowing by assigning him no new students and threatening disciplinary action.
At the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) on Monday, Bantry flute teacher Hugh Rance, a veteran employee of the Cork Education and Training Board School of Music, claimed that he and some of his colleagues had been paid for an "enormous number" of teaching hours with student vacancies over the past five years.
He maintained the problem had been building up since 2011, when responsibility for recruiting new students passed from the music teachers themselves to staff at Cork ETB School of Music's main office.
He told the Commission he calculated that his own teaching hours were 63% vacant, costing the State in the region of €50,000 a year - calling it a "waste and misuse of public funds" and "gross mismanagement".
Mr Rance said that having discussed the matter with his colleagues in October 2023, he discovered that 18 music teachers at the school had "excess vacant hours for a number of years" - their rates of unutilised teaching hours ranging from 35% to 70% in one case.
Mr Rance said he "naively believed" the matter would be addressed by senior management in the ETB when he raised it and that its chief executive, Denis Leamy, would take an interest in the matter when it was brought to him.
"I felt ignored. I felt the issues I raised were concealed - the principal had concealed them, I think, from the management. When I made my protected disclosure, I can't believe Cork ETB were aware of the extent of the problem," he said. However, he said the School of Music had been run "without oversight".
Mr Rance has denied a suggestion that he bears a "personal vendetta" against the school principal, Carol Daly - and insists he just wants to see the school "back on track".
The tribunal heard that Mr Rance made a series of communications to members of the Cork ETB management, including Mr Leamy, referring to unutilised hours and various other matters in September and October 2023. The ETB disputes that these amounted to protected disclosures and denies any penalisation.
In one letter, read into the record by Mr Rance, he said there were "serious implications of fiscal irresponsibility" because an "ineffective recruitment strategy" had left him teaching for just nine of the 22 hours a week he was contracted for.
In another, he wrote: "A situation where multiple Cork ETB teachers are paid out of public funds for which they are not provided with students and teaching duties may be construed as a misuse of public funds."
He added that it was the result of "neglect by ETB management over an extended period of time, long before the pandemic in this case".
"From the time I made a protected disclosure, suddenly an unprecedented number of advertisements for new students were posted on Facebook. I’ve documented that," he said.
He also alleged that from this point onward, other music teachers were assigned new students and "helped in getting new students" while he was provided with none, which he argued amounted to "discrimination on the basis of protected disclosures".
Mr Rance said the official assigned to assess his communications by the ETB told him he was "the only teacher affected by unutilised hours" and "turned down my protected disclosure and said it didn’t meet the criteria to be a protected disclosure because I hadn’t provided evidence [relating] to other teachers; I’d only provided information in relation to my own case".
However, having brought a further protected disclosure to the Minister for Education, he said he had since obtained correspondence from the ETB to the Department of Education stating that there were "only five teachers affected by unutilised hours" by April 2024.
Mr Rance has further alleged that the Cork ETB chief executive, Denis Leamy, subjected him to "harassment" in a series of letters criticising him "for making my protected disclosures and raising issues".
"There was a repeated pattern of negative criticism of me – what I would describe as bias – before my protected disclosure was assessed, I was being basically reprimanded for raising the issues," Mr Rance said.
The complainant said he was raising the "failure to comply with a legal obligation" to publish certain procedural documents on the organisation’s protected disclosures process and that the matter was directly linked to what he maintained were protected communications.
Earlier, the ETB’s solicitor Shane Crossan had told the WRC: "We’re here today for a pretty small issue which has grown to a pretty big issue." He said there had been "teething issues" at the start of the academic year in September 2023 with a new cloud-based rostering system which required music teachers to check online regularly to see whether they had been assigned new students.
Mr Rance had missed a lesson with a new pupil in September that year, with a dispute between the parties over whether the schedule had been updated or Mr Rance had failed to check it. The tribunal was told that after the missed lesson, Mr Rance wrote to the principal arguing that the new rostering arrangements were not in compliance with an amendment to the Terms of Employment (Information) Act 1994 because they failed to provide 24 hours’ notice of changes to working hours.
This was the basis for a secondary complaint brought by Mr Rance under the legislation, which is denied by Cork ETB, as it argues that Mr Rance is contracted to work a fixed pattern of hours.
Cross-examining Mr Rance on the Terms of Employment complaint, Mr Crossan put it to him: "It seems like you’ve got a personal vendetta against the principal." This was denied by the complainant, who said: "I’ve no personal grievance against Carol Daly at all."
Cork ETB is expected to present evidence later in the proceedings from the principal, Ms Daly; the board’s chief executive officer, Mr Leamy, and the board’s director of organisational support, Sarah Flynn, all of whom were sworn as witnesses yesterday.
Mr Rance said one teacher he had intended to call as a witness had dropped out because they "did not wish to risk penalisation as a result". Mr Crossan objected to this as a "bald allegation". Mr Rance added that a second teacher "withdrew because the first withdrew".
Adjudicator Patsy Doyle said she would adjourn the matter yesterday evening, with Mr Rance’s cross-examination on the Protected Disclosures Act 2014 penalisation claim expected to take place at a later date.
