Provision of Students’ Welfare and its Influence on Discipline Management in Public Secondary Schools at Kisumu County, Kenya

Abstract

Provision of welfare services to students is one way of attaining a solution to depressive symptoms predicted by typical school experiences. Whereas administrators of many secondary schools have put in place various welfare services, public schools in some regions of Kenya such as Kisumu County have continued to experience student indiscipline incidents over the years. The objective of this paper was to investigate the influence of provision of student welfare services on discipline management among public secondary schools at Kisumu County in Kenya. Specifically, the paper analysed how provision of health services influence student discipline and how provision of social support services influence discipline management in public secondary schools. The General Systems Theory advanced by Ludwig von Bertalanffy was adopted to guide the study. This research adopted a cross – sectional survey design on a target population of 225 public secondary schools comprising 225 principals, 225 discipline masters and 225 student council leaders. Yamane’s formula was used to obtain of 144 schools: 144 school principals, 144 discipline masters, and 144 student council leaders, alongside 7 sub county education officers, thus forming 439 as the study sample. Closed ended questionnaire was used to collect data from discipline masters and student council leaders while interviews were done with school principals and sub county education officers. Content validity index and split-have methods were computed to check validity and reliability respectively. Findings showed that there was satisfaction with health (M=4.9; SD=1.23) and social (M=4.81; SD=1.19) service provisions among the secondary schools. It is further illustrated that there was a statistically significant positive correlation between students’ welfare management and students’ discipline (n=137, r=.261, p=.002). It is concluded that provision of appropriate student welfare services can lead to a significant improvement in students’ discipline among public secondary schools. This finding should inform formulation of tailored welfare services to students in every secondary school, and further research ought to be done on the effect of healthcare needs provision on students’ discipline management in public secondary schools.