Abstract
The study investigated the effectiveness of school guidance services as perceived by principals in Edo State, Nigeria. The study sought to examine secondary school principals’ perception on the effectiveness of guidance services (orientation, appraisal, information and counselling services) and determine gender and school location differences in principals’ perception of the effectiveness of counselling services in schools. The descriptive survey design was adopted for the study. A sample of 36 schools (1 rural and 1 urban) were drawn from public senior secondary schools in the study area using purposive random sampling. The instrument used for the collection of data was a self-developed questionnaire titled: “School Guidance Services Effectiveness Questionnaire (SOGSEQ)”. The construct validity was ascertained by the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) while the Cronbach reliability alpha of the questionnaire yielded an overall index of 0.84. The descriptive statistics such as mean (X ̅) and standard deviation (S.D) was used to analyze the research question 1 while the t-test for independent sample means was used to test the hypothesis at 0.05 alpha level. Results from the analysis showed that principals perceived orientation services to be the only effective guidance service in secondary schools in Edo State. Result further showed that there is a significant difference between rural and urban principals in their perception on the effectiveness of school guidance services (appraisal, information and counselling services) in secondary schools in Edo State. It is recommended that guidance counsellors in the secondary schools should realize that their guidance services should be such that will enable them to meet the needs of learners in schools. For this to be achieved, school heads, teachers, parents and the government must also be actively involved in providing their support for the delivery of the services when necessary
Highlights
School guidance programme and services is the main domain of trained school counsellors and anything that has to do with this service must be performed by guidance counsellors
The results showed that principals perceived school guidance services and counsellors to be effective in the provision of orientation services in secondary schools in Edo State but ineffective in others
Result disagrees with the result of Nwoye (2003) school counsellors were effective in: organising orientation to help new students from primary to secondary school adjust to the new environment; defining and interpreting the objectives of the guidance programme to the principal, teachers, students, parents and members of the community; identifying guidance needs of students and keeping teachers informed of developments which may have bearing on classroom situations among others
Summary
School guidance programme and services is the main domain of trained school counsellors and anything that has to do with this service must be performed by guidance counsellors. In other to solve some of these challenges, some professional services have been introduced under the school guidance programme to assist students overcome the challenges they experience at home and at school. These services are known as ‘school guidance services’. Adomeh (2006) referred to school guidance services as specialized services carried out by trained guidance counsellors in addressing or meeting specific needs of students. He identified nine (9) school guidance services to include: orientation, research and follow up, planning and placement, appraisal, information, referral, consultation, counselling and evaluation services. Shertzer and Stone (2009), for example, stated that counsellors have functioned in the roles of: (i) quasi-administrators who act in the absence of principals; they assign teachers and students to classes and are responsible for extracurricular activities; (ii) generalises who have no specific function but have priority placed on orientation, group guidance, a developer of cumulative records as well as a testing expert; (iii) specialists who give counselling priority over all other activities; (iv) change agents or (v) psychological educators
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