SOME TEACHERS were paid more than €47 an hour for supervision and substitution duties they did not perform, according to a report from the Comptroller and Auditor General published yesterday.
In a scathing review of poor management within the education sector, the comptroller said he was also “disturbed” by the belief among some third-level lecturers that they were required to work only 16 hours per week to fulfil their contract.
His criticisms were made in a review of the controversial case where an engineering lecturer, Fergal O’Malley, worked “full-time” in both Athlone Institute of Technology and NUI Galway for eight years.
He resigned from both posts – where he earned a total of €170,000 a year – after the controversy came to light more than two years ago.
On supervision and substitution, Comptroller John Buckley found teachers were paid €1,860 a year to provide 37 hours of supervision or substitution. But his investigation found that they worked only an average of 30 out of the 37 hours for which they were paid.
“In practice, payment is being made for work not completed,” he concludes.
The report makes a series of other criticisms, including:
The full amount of the grant was not applied for the purpose intended in some schools;
Some schools could not demonstrate how the portion used was applied;
Since some schools only used the supervision and substitution scheme as a last option, there is a risk that money is being paid for supervision and substitution in circumstances where a pool of teachers has already been paid to provide it;
Pupils lose out in circumstances where teachers (where qualified to do so) do not teach when providing substitution.
All told, the supervision and substitution scheme and the additional substitution cover scheme cost more than €280 million per year. The scheme was introduced in 2003 during the bitter ASTI dispute. The McCarthy report was also highly critical of the scheme.
Last night, Minister for Education Batt O’Keeffe said important changes had been made to the scheme, yielding savings of more than €25 million.
On the O’Malley case, the comptroller says it was “disturbing that some lecturers have a belief that their obligations to an institute of technology are exhausted upon delivery of contract hours which are set in terms of a norm of 16 hours per week’.’