A primary school teacher has won €20,000 in compensation after accusing her bosses of showing “subconscious bias” towards her when she applied for a deputy principal role following a dispute over parental leave.
Paulette Leonard, who has 28 years’ service, secured the order against the board of management of Farnham National School in Co Cavan on foot of a complaint of penalisation under the Parental Leave Act 1998.
Ms Leonard’s trade union, the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation, said in a legal submission to the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) that the complainant asked in June 2020 for six periods of parental leave in September and October that year, only to be refused.
In an email rejecting the leave application, the school told her: “Due to the worldwide Covid pandemic and the fact that children will have been off school nearly six months at the time of their return, children will need stability. Consequently, no discretionary leave will be granted for September [or] October.”
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Six periods of leave were approved by the school between November 2020 and May 2021, but only on condition that Ms Leonard “surrender” the statutory leave she would have been entitled to for that academic year, her trade union representative submitted.
The INTO took up the matter with the school in July 2020, after which a notice appeared in the staff room requiring staff to take any parental leave longer than three weeks as a single block. The union said that when Ms Leonard went for a deputy principal post at the school in December that year, there was a “bias” against her at interview as a result of the parental leave dispute.
This was denied by the school, with principal Geraldine Dolan giving evidence that there was “no residual acrimony or any animosity” and that the interview took place “several months” later.
“Some of the questions at the interview were put to throw the complainant off due to this subconscious bias as a form of penalisation due to her parental leave application and to favour the eventual successful candidate, who did not apply for parental leave in that school year,” the union submitted.
Counsel for the school board, Claire Bruton BL, said the candidates for the role each achieved “the same weighting” for performance at interview and that the complainant had “failed to provide any link”.
“This is pure speculation on her part. If she had any real concerns about the composition of the interview panel she would have objected from the outset – she did not,” Ms Bruton said.
The tribunal also heard evidence from Vincent Mulvey, the third independent member of the interview panel, who said the interactions over parental leave had been raised in a preparatory meeting for the interviews. Mr Mulvey’s evidence was that he understood this to be “background information relevant to the candidate”.
In his decision, WRC adjudicator Shay Henry ruled that Ms Leonard was “out of time” to pursue a discrimination claim against the school board because she had submitted her complaints forms too late to bring the alleged incidents into the WRC’s jurisdiction.
However, he said he had to consider the penalisation aspect and that the evidence of the independent assessor, Mr Mulvey, was “clearly at odds” with the school board’s denial of bias and the principal’s suggestion that the parental leave row was “in the past”.
“If it was in the past and not relevant, why was it mentioned to the independent assessor in the context of preparation for the interviews?” Mr Henry wrote.
He said he had to conclude that the dealings between the complainant and the school on parental leave were “considered relevant to her application for the post of deputy principal, and not in a positive way”.
Mr Henry ruled Ms Leonard had been “treated unfairly” for exercising her entitlement to parental leave and ordered Farnham National School to pay her €20,000 in compensation.