English

Abstract

Guidance and counselling is increasingly becoming an important service in secondary schools in Kenya and the world at large. The needs of learners in secondary schools are constantly changing as the society is changing paving way for counselling services to be up scaled to address both academic and other issues. The purpose of this study is to investigate the views of students on the impact of guidance and counselling on academic needs. The research study was guided by Gestalt theory of perception and the Ex Post Facto research design was adopted for the study. The target population was all secondary students within Rift Valley Region and ten schools were selected from five counties through stratified and simple random sampling. Four hundred and fifty students were selected. Data collection was done using questionnaire which was validated by experts in counselling; it has a reliability index of 0.89 which was appropriate. Data analysis was done descriptively and inferentially. The study concludes that there is a connection between the provision of guidance and counselling services and the satisfaction of academic desires. Additionally, the workload for teacher counselors should be reduced for them to find time to address students’ academic and other personal needs. The study recommends multiple approaches to implementation of counselling programs in school set up involving many actors such as counselors, principals, subject teachers among others.   Key words: Perception, guidance, counselling, satisfaction, academic needs.