An education and training board has allegedly punished a music teacher for coming out with information about financial mismanagement by not offering him any new students and threatening to take disciplinary action. The teacher claims that a State-funded music school has been wasting public funds by paying him and his colleagues for lessons that it had no students to attend, reports RTE.
Hugh Rance, a long-time employee of the Cork Education and Training Board School of Music, stated at the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) on Monday that he and a few of his colleagues had been paid for a “enormous number” of teaching hours with student vacancies over the previous five years.
He said that the issue began to arise in 2011 when the Cork ETB School of Music’s main office personnel took over the duty of hiring new pupils in place of the music professors themselves, reports RTE.
He estimated before the Commission that his own teaching hours were 63% unused, costing the State around €50,000 annually. He described this as a “gross mismanagement” and a “waste and misuse of public funds.”
Following a discussion with his colleagues in October 2023, Mr. Rance stated that he had learnt that eighteen music professors at the school had “excess vacant hours for a number of years”; in one instance, their rates of unused teaching hours ranged from 35% to 70%.
When Mr Rance brought up the issue, he said he “naively believed” that top management at the ETB would handle it and that the organization’s CEO, Denis Leamy, would be interested in hearing about it, reports RTE.
“I experienced neglect. I received the impression that the concerns I brought up were hidden—I believe the principal had done so from the administration. “I find it unbelievable that Cork ETB knew about the severity of the issue when I made my protected disclosure,” the man remarked. But the School of Music, he claimed, had been administered “without oversight”.
Mr. Rance maintains that he simply wants to get the school “back on track” and has refuted claims that he has a “personal vendetta” against Carol Daly, the principal of the institution, reports RTE.
The tribunal was informed that in September and October of 2023, Mr. Rance corresponded with many Cork ETB management members, including Mr. Leamy, over unused time and other issues. The ETB contests the idea that these were protected disclosures and rejects any punishment.
In one letter, which Mr. Rance read into the record, he claimed that there were “serious implications of fiscal irresponsibility” since he was only teaching nine of the twenty-two hours a week that he was contracted to teach due to a “ineffective recruitment strategy”.
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,” reports RTE.
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