A flute teacher who said he was penalised for blowing the whistle on an alleged misuse of public funds at a State-backed music school intends to appeal a tribunal ruling that complaints he raised did not amount to a protected disclosure.
The Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) has rejected a claim under the Protected Disclosures Act 2014 by Hugh Rance, a long-serving music teacher at the Cork Education and Training Board School of Music.
The tribunal has dismissed Mr Rance’s case with a ruling that his claims alleging “waste and misuse of public funds” by the management of the school in late 2023, due to the level of vacant teaching hours, did not amount to a protected act.
Mr Rance, who appeared before the WRC last year as a lay litigant, said he was taking legal advice and intended to appeal the ruling to the Labour Court.
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At a hearing last August at the WRC’s offices on Eglinton Street in Cork, Mr Rance said he and some of his colleagues had been paid for an “enormous number” of teaching hours with student vacancies over the preceding five years.
He said the problem had been building up since 2011, when responsibility for recruiting new students passed from the music teachers themselves to staff at Cork Education and Training Board (CETB) School of Music’s main office.
He told the Commission he calculated that his own teaching hours were 63 per cent 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, 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 per cent to 70 per cent in one case.
In a September 2023 email, Mr Rance wrote to a manager referring to “serious implications of fiscal irresponsibility” and an “ineffective recruitment strategy”. He said this had resulted in a situation where “a teacher ends up, as is now the case, with 11 students instead of between 30 and 40 students”.
“This has resulted in only having enough students to teach for nine hours a week, instead of the contracted 22 hours for which they are paid,” Mr Rance’s email said.
He said “all the flute teachers” had student vacancies in October 2024 and he was aware that 18 music teachers had “excess vacant hours for a number of years”.
The email “bounced back” as that manager “no longer worked” at the organisation, the tribunal heard. Mr Rance then emailed Denis Leamy, the chief executive of the Cork ETB, on October 2nd, with a copy of the September 30th letter. The complainant asked the chief executive to “personally review the email and letter and let me know what your intentions are in resolving the issues referred to”.
He denied a suggestion that he bears a “personal vendetta” against the school principal, Carol Daly – and insists he just wanted to see the school “back on track”.
The chief executive, Mr Leamy, said of the October 2nd email: “It was not new news. We knew about vacancies.”
He said Mr Rance had caused “a good deal of upset to staff” with “a continuum of threats ... on Freedom of Information, Protected Disclosure and data access deadlines”, which had taken “thousands of hours” for administrators to address.
He said CETB had determined that the October 2nd, 2023 email from Mr Rance was “not found to constitute a protected disclosure”, and denied any penalisation.
Giving evidence, Ms Daly said she knew nothing of Mr Rance’s original email until June 2024, after his WRC complaint was filed, and “denied gross mismanagement”, the WRC said.
Flute lessons were “not popular” following the Covid-19 pandemic, she said, referring to the sharing of instruments.
Ms Daly said she was “flabbergasted” by his allegations, denied the School of Music was “stagnant” and said it was “re-energising through promotional videos and external public relations”.
Enda McWeeney, CETB’s finance director, carried out a review of Mr Rance’s correspondence, but ultimately said that the material put in front of him was “a bare allegation, and not a protected disclosure”.
He said there had been five teachers “underutilised” at the School of Music, according to attendance records, but that he did not think a financial audit was necessary.
In her decision, adjudication officer Patsy Doyle wrote: “What occurred in this case amounted to a matter of interpersonal grievance exclusively affecting the complainant and his line manager.
“The complainant had a different opinion in how the school was progressing and somehow could not find a platform to express these views through individual or collect[ive] grievances.
“I find I cannot elevate these grievances to what the law requires in a protected disclosure,” Ms Doyle said, dismissing the penalisation complaint.
Cork Education and Training Board was represented by Shane Crossan of O’Flynn Exhams Solicitors before the WRC.
