CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.0 BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY
Guidance and counseling is an integral part of an ideal educational system. The New Encyclopaedia Britannica defined counselling as the process of helping an individual discover and develop his educational, vocational and psychological potentialities and thereby achieve an optimal level of personal happiness and social usefulness.
According to Anamaeze (2002), counselling is a personal relationship between a counsellor and a counselee in which, the counsellor helps the counselee to learn more satisfying behaviour necessary for solving his problems. Guidance and counseling programmes for secondary school students are designed to address the physical, emotional, social, vocational and academic difficulties of adolescent students. Counseling is a form of education which the students receive from their counselors.
The essence of incorporating guidance and counseling into the school system was to eliminate overwhelming ignorance of many young people on their choices of career prospects and personality maladjustment among school children. This is to complement learning in the classroom and also enhance academic performance/achievements of students.
Guidance and counseling plays a vital role in preventing educational, personal, social, mental, emotional and other similar problems among secondary school students. Ministry of Education and principals of schools are aware of the heavy reliance placed on guidance and counseling services for most aspects of the new 9-3-4 educational system to actually succeed.
These services are presented by Nwachukwu (2007) as information services, placement services, appraisal services, vocational guidance services, counseling services, referral services, evaluation, follow-up, consultancy and research services.
The importance of guidance and counseling programme in secondary schools cannot be overemphasized because there is a need for the students to have an increased understanding of the educational, vocational and social information needed to make wise choices. Thus, counselling is imperative in order to correct the anomaly observed in Nigerian secondary schools.
Ifelunni (2003) stated that there are three (3) main areas in which every individual requires counselling. These areas are: vocational counselling, socio-personal counselling and educational counselling. Students can adequately be counselled under these areas. Vocational counselling aims at helping students match their personal attributes and background with suitable jobs and employment opportunities. Personal socio counselling takes care of problems of students such as boy-girl relationship, manners and etiquettes, personal appearance, home and family relationship. Education counselling addresses issues related to students’ academic excellence such as study habit, examination techniques, time management, procrastination, and how to choose subjects.
The above can be actualized only when the counselling services are made attractive enough to students and are well marketed. However, in Nigeria today guidance and counseling services are not marketable. This is due to a lot of factors and shortcomings which needs to be addressed to make guidance and counseling services attractive enough to generate income.