End-of-year grading hassle: app overload and reporting errors

BarcelonaHe despair, hewait or, directly, the disaster. These are some of the names many teachers at Catalan schools and colleges have used in recent days to refer to Esfer@, the platform used in public schools to record grades at the end of each term and at the end of the school year. The reason behind this mockery is that, although not a new problem this year, this application frequently generates problems when they arrive in the final weeks before closing student files. This is the time when the largest number of teachers must access it—around 100,000 teachers must enter the grades of almost 1.5 million students—and the system ends up becoming saturated.

"The evaluation program has suffered many outages and has caused a lot of slowness in carrying out the process of closing each student's grades," the director of a public school in Maresme complains to ARA. He explains that in his case, they have resolved it "through many more hours and a lot of patience from the teachers." Some schools have also had to return to more traditional methods for conducting final assessments. "We're holding assessment meetings by taking notes by hand and singing the notes out loud," explains Oriol, a teacher at a high school in Baix Llobregat.

However, in other schools, extra dedication from teachers hasn't been enough. At a public school in Vallès Occidental, faced with the disruption experienced with Esfer@, families have had to be informed that there were errors in their children's final grades. The report, which included comments about the children's evaluations that didn't reflect the student's situation, was not included in the document.

Widespread saturation for years

The problems don't only affect these schools; difficulties managing the application have spread throughout the public school system, but not to the private sector, which uses a different mechanism. "The system fails every school year, and we've been reporting this for years," says Iolanda Segura, spokesperson for the USTEC union. She criticizes this malfunction as causing teachers to "invest a tremendous amount of hours" for work that could be completed in an hour, and some even choose to do this work from home at night to try to avoid peak hours and meet deadlines. "Every year, it doesn't matter; the computer system isn't up to par, and they don't fix it," she insists.

In fact, the CCOO (City of Workers' Workers' Association) warns that the problems with Esfer@ have been going on for more than six years. "We've been reporting since 2019 that at times when a lot of people are working, it crashes and always causes problems," says spokesperson Marga Romartínez. For this reason, the union has repeatedly called on Education to financially compensate teachers for the overtime they must put in to complete this process.

Sources from the Department of Education maintain that "the system has incorporated improvements to reinforce capacity throughout the year," but admit that, "however, it has not been sufficient." They also explain that this year, the incorporation of "the entire volume of vocational training into the system has led to a very significant increase in the use of the infrastructure." Therefore, they point out that currently 3% of grades have not been recorded, but that, in contrast, more than 16 million grades have been entered (97% of the total).

The same sources insist that the department continues working to resolve "the peaks and incidents that may still arise before the end of the school year," and is also seeking "more comprehensive solutions." On the other hand, they are also constantly monitoring the entire infrastructure to ensure that grades can be entered.