Taxpayers have paid more than €1m for music teachers at rural Cork schools to remain idle, a whistleblower has claimed, writes Michael O’Farrell.

In a protected disclosure to the Irish Mail on Sunday, one of these teachers has told how he was paid €72,733 last year for working less than 40% of the time.

Hugh Rance, a flute and saxophone teacher based in West Cork, is a full-time employee of a music school run by the Cork Education and Training Board (CETB).

The music school employs 60 teachers who are each supposed to be allocated 22 tuition hours a week in different schools throughout the county.

But because of what he claims is mismanagement at the CETB, Mr Rance was only allocated 7.5 hours of classes a week last year, meaning he was idle for 62.91% of the time.

In his disclosure this week, Mr Rance outlines he has been paid more than €215,000 for thousands of hours of lessons for which no pupil was organised in recent years.

Since 2011, when the organisation of local lessons was centralised in Cork city, Mr Rance estimates that he has been paid for 3,125 hours when he was not allocated any pupils.

He alleges as many as 20 other music teachers at the CETB may have been in a similar position. In a bid to get the overall figures for wasted teaching hours at the CETB, Mr Rance sought the information under the Freedom of Information Act.

However, his request was rejected as vexatious by the CETB even as each of the other four ETB music schools throughout the country willingly supplied their data, all of which showed no such vacancies.

Mr Rance said: “Over the last five years many Cork ETB music teachers have had to spend thousands of hours sitting at home because they were not provided with students while still being paid by the Department of Education.

“When you add the other teachers affected it must amount to over €1m in wasted funds. It is shocking that this waste of public funds is happening at a time when schools are under severe financial pressures to cope within their existing budgets.”

Before making his protected disclosure, Mr Rance tried to raise the matter internally with the CETB. However, the CETB refused to consider his disclosures as valid and declined to meet him to hear his suggestions.

Faced with this refusal, Mr Rance went above the heads of the CETB and made a disclosure directly to Education Minister Norma Foley last October.

He said: “I asked the Department of Education to investigate how this came about, expecting them to remedy the situation.

“This was because Cork ETB had failed to adequately support or promote the music scheme to maintain student numbers.”

It then took the department five months to write to the CETB to seek information. In its letter to the CETB, the department also asked management about claims in Mr Rance’s disclosure of a cover up.

The letter states: “Mr Rance has set out a number of issues which he believes are indicative of a failure to comply with legal obligations, misuse of public funds, grossly negligent or grossly mismanaged acts or omissions of a public body and concealment or destruction of information (or attempt to conceal or destroy information) about any of the above.”

These potential cover-up concerns relate to claims in Mr Rance’s disclosure that digital records of employee-working times prior to 2021 have been “illegally deleted” and that the CETB and the Department of Education are “complicit” in “the concealment of information”.

In its response to the department by letter this April, the CETB conceded that five music teachers “were found to be under utilised to varying degrees” this year.

The CETB did not indicate the extent of this ongoing under-utilisation and did not give the department details about the historical situation since 2011.

The CETB also rejected any suggestions of conflicts of interest during appointments and denied any cover up.

The CETB assured the department its initial assessment found “no prima facie evidence that a wrongdoing may have occurred”.

The letter added: “No further action will be taken under the Protected Disclosures policy and the matter is now closed.”

In May, Mr Rance asked the department to review the CETB’s decision to reject his disclosure. After he received no response to this request, Mr Rance made his disclosure to the Irish Mail on Sunday.

He said: “The EU whistleblowing directive says there should be transparency and accountability in the public interest, but the Department of Education ignored this and tried to shut down my protected disclosure without completing an effective assessment or investigation.

“I believe they deliberately took no action to avoid any reputational damage. The effect of what I believe is an attempted cover-up has left the situation unresolved.

“As a result, many students around county Cork have missed out on having subsidised music lessons, particularly in rural areas like West Cork, because the scheme has not been effectively managed or promoted and this must now be properly addressed.”

In response to queries from the Irish Mail on Sunday, a spokesman for the CETB said that the board had “dealt with any Protected Disclosures made in accordance with the relevant Act”.

Meanwhile a spokesman for the Department of Education said Mr Rance’s correspondence had been “considered in accordance with the department procedures under the Protected Disclosures Act”.

Photo: Hugh Rance, music teacher at his home in Durrus, West Cork. Photo by Sean Dwyer