Teachers Face TPAD Crisis as Server Failures Disrupt Access to Three-Year Reports
A wave of frustration is sweeping through Kenya’s teaching fraternity as thousands of educators shortlisted for the ongoing Teachers Service Commission (TSC) promotion interviews find themselves locked out of a system they desperately need.
At the center of the storm is the Teacher Performance Appraisal and Development (TPAD) portal, which teachers say has been crashing repeatedly, denying them access to the three-year performance reports that form a mandatory part of their interview documentation.
The timing could not be worse. TSC kicked off its promotion interviews on Tuesday, September 8, starting with primary school teachers, as part of a recruitment and promotion drive covering 34,016 vacancies spread across grades C1 to D4. Out of a pool of 126,000 applicants who sought these positions, 78,732 teachers were shortlisted and are now expected to appear before interview panels armed with a complete, verified documentation portfolio.
For many of them, that portfolio is incomplete — not because they lack the qualifications or service record, but because the online system meant to issue their appraisal history simply will not cooperate.
A System Buckling Under Pressure
According to affected teachers, the TPAD portal has become almost unusable in the days surrounding the interviews. Many report that the site takes an inordinately long time to load, and when it finally does open, it crashes almost immediately — often before a user can even navigate to the archived appraisal section.
Others describe repeated timeouts, blank pages, and error messages that force them to restart the process over and over, sometimes without success.
The frustration is compounded by the fact that this is not a cosmetic inconvenience. TSC requires every candidate appearing before a promotion panel to produce TPAD reports covering three consecutive appraisal years — 2023, 2024, and 2025.
These reports are not optional extras; they are a scored component of the official promotion assessment sheet, carrying real weight in determining whether a candidate ultimately secures the position they have applied for.
Under the TSC promotion scoresheet, TPAD ratings account for a maximum of 10 marks out of 100. The rating scale works on a sliding bracket system tied to a teacher’s average appraisal performance:
- An average score of 81% and above earns a teacher the full 10 marks.
- A score of 61% to 80% earns 8 marks.
- A score of 41% to 60% earns 6 marks.
- A score of 21% to 40% earns 4 marks.
- A score of 1% to 20% earns only 2 marks.
This component is explicitly designed to reward consistency, evaluating a candidate’s performance trend across the past three appraisal cycles rather than a single snapshot in time.
For teachers unable to retrieve their historical reports, that means walking into an interview with a documentation gap in a category that directly affects their final score — a gap entirely outside their control, caused by a system failure rather than any shortcoming in their professional record.
Teachers Voice Their Frustration
Across staffrooms and teacher forums, the mood has shifted from mild annoyance to open frustration. Teachers preparing for panels this week say they have tried logging into the portal at different times of day, using different browsers and devices, all with the same discouraging result: a system that either refuses to open or dies the moment it does.
For those whose interview dates are imminent, the pressure is particularly acute, since there is little room left to keep retrying while also attending to the rest of their promotion file.
Many teachers are now publicly appealing to TSC to intervene urgently, arguing that the commission cannot reasonably penalize candidates for failing to produce a document that the commission’s own infrastructure is preventing them from accessing.
Their central argument is straightforward: the requirement to present three years of TPAD reports is fair and defensible, but it can only be fair if the system that generates those reports is actually functional when candidates need it most.
There is also a broader anxiety at play. With interview panels functioning largely as document verification exercises, a missing or incomplete TPAD record does not just cost marks — in the eyes of some teachers, it also risks raising doubts in the minds of panelists about a candidate’s overall preparedness, even when the fault lies squarely with the online platform rather than the individual.
What TSC Requires — and Why It Matters So Much
To understand why the server crashes have triggered such alarm, it helps to look at how central TPAD has become to the entire promotion architecture. The TPAD framework was introduced to track and improve teacher performance across several dimensions: curriculum delivery, lesson preparation, professional development engagement, learner safety, and involvement in co-curricular activities.
When panels sit to interview candidates for promotion from C1 up through D4, they are not simply confirming a teacher’s physical presence in the classroom over the years.
They are scrutinizing consistency, growth, and institutional contribution over time — precisely the kind of longitudinal picture that a three-year TPAD history is meant to provide.
Panels reportedly interrogate several strands within this appraisal data, including how consistently a teacher has uploaded schemes of work, lesson plans, and lesson notes; how learners have performed in formative and summative assessments under that teacher’s guidance; the teacher’s engagement with Teacher Professional Development (TPD) modules and peer collaboration; and, for those in or aspiring to administrative roles, evidence of leadership in managing institutional responsibilities.
A gap in this three-year record, or the inability to present certified physical copies at the interview table, can result in lost points — or in more severe cases, outright disqualification.
It is precisely because the stakes are this high that the current server crisis has generated such widespread concern. Teachers are not simply missing a convenience; they are missing a mandatory, scored requirement, through no fault of their own.
How Teachers Can Attempt to Retrieve Their Reports
While many educators wait for TSC to resolve the underlying technical problems, a workaround procedure has been circulating among teachers attempting to retrieve their archived appraisals despite the instability of the portal. The process, while technical, has helped some candidates successfully pull up their historical records:
- Log in to the TPAD account. Teachers begin by opening a web browser and navigating to the official TSC TPAD portal, then entering their TSC and ID number, password, and the security captcha to access their dashboard.
- Navigate to Appraisals. From the dashboard, teachers should locate the APPRAISALS tab and select SELF APPRAISAL from the drop-down menu.
- Access archived appraisals. Clicking on VIEW ARCHIVED APPRAISAL takes users into the historical records section. At this point, many browsers flag a security warning, since the archived records sit on older backend directories with outdated security certificates.
- Bypass the browser security prompt. Teachers are advised to click ADVANCED (or “Show Details,” depending on the browser) and then PROCEED, sometimes phrased as “Proceed to tpad.tsc.go.ke (unsafe).” This warning, while alarming in appearance, is described as a routine notification tied to the age of the government server infrastructure rather than an actual security threat.
- Select the relevant term appraisals. Once inside, teachers can locate the specific years — 2023, 2024, and 2025 — and click VIEW APPRAISAL on the far right of each term’s row.
- Print each page. Using Ctrl+P (or Cmd+P on Mac), teachers can print each appraisal page to a PDF or directly to a printer, taking care that term grades, teaching standards scores, and institutional comments are fully visible and not cropped out by page margins.
Once printed, teachers are advised to calculate their annual performance averages by summing their termly scores for each year and dividing by three, then cross-checking that these figures match what they input into the promotion application portal.
Discrepancies between the online submission and the physical, stamped reports can trigger integrity queries during verification, so accuracy at this stage matters. The final printed reports should then be taken to the Head of Institution or Principal for official signing and stamping before being filed securely.
The Bigger Picture: A Portfolio Under Pressure
TPAD reports are only one piece, albeit a heavily weighted one, of the broader documentation portfolio candidates must assemble.
Alongside the appraisal records, teachers are expected to present original identification documents, academic and professional certificates, letters of appointment to their current grade, recent payslips, their last promotional letter, and — for those eyeing administrative posts — evidence of assigned responsibility such as Board of Management appointment letters.
Evidence of wider professional engagement, from curriculum development work to co-curricular leadership, rounds out a file that panels expect to be organized, paginated, and properly certified.
Against this backdrop, the TPAD server crisis represents more than a technical glitch — it strikes at one of the few genuinely quantifiable, scored elements of an otherwise heavily qualitative interview process.
For the tens of thousands of teachers currently working through this promotion cycle, the appeal to TSC is simple and urgent: stabilize the portal, extend reasonable flexibility to affected candidates, and ensure that a server crash does not end up costing hardworking educators marks they have already earned through years of documented classroom performance.
As interviews continue in the days ahead, all eyes remain on whether TSC will respond with a fix — or at least an accommodation — before more candidates find themselves standing before a panel with an incomplete file through no fault of their own.
