Educational centers explode against the tool that replaces GestIB: "We have our hands on our heads"

PalmaThe educational centers of the Balearic Islands have been facing serious problems since the beginning of the year with Llull, the new educational management tool promoted by the Ministry of Education. The system, which will progressively replace GestIB, has been awarded for 5.4 million euros to the multinational Ayesa and has a clear origin: it is the same software used by the Junta de Andalucía, from whom it has been 'copied'. In fact, the implementation itself has evidenced this dependence on the base model, to the point of bizarre situations: "One day I was in Llull, I clicked on validate and sign invoice and a tab from the Junta de Andalucía opened up for me," explains the director of a center in western Mallorca.

The system has been rolling out since January and, for now, is only operational for management teams in economic management and in other basic areas, such as processing registrations and terminations.

However, problems have been accumulating since the very beginning and are fully impacting the daily operation of the centers. The system presents constant errors, modules that do not respond, difficulties in validating invoices, and an electronic signature that fails or requires one-by-one processes, without the promise of mass signing. To this is added another key element: budgetary management is practically paralyzed, since the Ministry has not yet authorized the preparation of next year's budgets in many centers, and in some cases, neither this year's nor next year's available allocation is even known.

Budgetary management in collapse

“We are going in blind”, summarizes the secretary of a high school in Palma. “We have our hands over our heads. We are doing what we can”, he continues. “We are three months behind in all budgetary management. The Ministry is not rushing us, they tell us to be patient, but we can’t start. Now we have to do April, we have to do model 111 for withholdings and advance payments for the declaration, but we can’t. During the holidays I was entering invoices and I have the accounting more or less under control. There are more problems than we thought. The Llull program was not ready”, indicates the same secretary.

In parallel, the centers report a growing blockage in invoice processing. The system introduced almost a year ago, far from simplifying management, has aggravated the difficulties that Llull is now dragging, as it prevents manual invoice entry in many cases and forces us to wait for electronic linkage with supplier invoices, which has generated months of backlogs. Invoices for January and February have not yet been entered in numerous centers, and there are some from March, but not all. All this while no payment can be validated without the director’s signature, which has become a real bottleneck.

The director of the western center explains the change in operation: “Before, invoice data was entered manually and then an option appeared: ‘Do you want to link them electronically?’. If you said yes, it redirected you to another page where companies that had uploaded their electronic invoices could be searched, selected, and automatically linked to the manual invoice you had entered”.

With the new system, she details, the procedure has become notably stricter: “Now everything works the other way around. We can no longer enter invoices manually, only those for which we know for sure that they are from companies that cannot issue electronic invoices”. And she adds: “If they are large companies like Rotger and Gràfiques Madrid, which do issue electronic invoices, you cannot enter them manually. You have to wait for the Ministry to upload them to the platform and then accept them”.

According to this director, the collapse is evident: “Right now all invoices have to go through the director. If he doesn't sign them, they are not generated. Everything has to be validated by management”. She also denounces that a solution announced to temporarily speed up the process does not work: “It was said that a ‘bulk signature’ would be implemented, but it doesn't work: everything has to be signed one by one”. Meanwhile, administrative assistants, who with the Ecoib tool were in charge of budget management with the approval of the director and the secretary, can no longer do so because they have not been trained in Llull.

A WhatsApp group for the 'survivors'

Discontent is spreading among many management teams, who have even created informal spaces for mutual support: “There is a WhatsApp group called ‘Surviving Llull’, with 80 people. People are desperate. Everyone is asking and no one knows what to answer,” explains another source from a Mallorcan management team. The situation has also strained relations with the Administration: “When we contact the Ministry, they refer us to the UGE (Economic Management Unit), which is overwhelmed,” he states.

Current incidents lead many centers to recall previous training, which they describe as insufficient: “They were done online from Andalusia, with screens that were barely visible and poor quality video recordings. It was like teaching someone to drive without ever having seen a car,” say sources from an educational center in Menorca.

The director of a center in Pla de Mallorca is blunt: “The system doesn't work correctly: it has errors, it stops constantly, and the modules don't respond well. Accounting couldn't be launched because it doesn't work”. And he adds: “It's a program that cost almost six million euros and gives worse performance than Ecoib, which the Ministry said was obsolete...”. From the Tramuntana mountain range, another director confirms that the implementation is still minimal: “For now, we've only opened it, and that's it. We haven't entered any invoices yet, because since it doesn't work, we're taking it easy,” she says.

Awaiting the enrollment process

To all this is added the uncertainty about the immediate future of the system, while the centers continue to accumulate backlog work and wait for the platform to start working normally. Among the management teams, a shared concern is growing: what will happen if the schooling process ends up depending on Llull, as it seems it will. "It will be a total chaos," assures the secretary of the institute in Palma. "I don't know how they propose to do the enrollments through Llull, as they told us in a meeting. I don't know how they will do it, because the students' data are not even incorporated into the tool yet," points out the director of a school in the Mallorcan east.