ABSTRACT
Guidance and counselling services are integral part of education meant to enhance student’s educational, vocational and personal social aspirations. It involves helping individuals especially the students at their adolescent age to find solutions to their problems. This study has examined the perception of students and attitudes towards the utilisation of guidance and counselling services in Benin metropolis.
This study adopted descriptive survey research design. The public secondary schools in Oredo Local Government Area were used as case study which comprised 14 secondary schools with the total population of 5,973 SSII students. Two hundred and twenty six students were sampled, however, 220 questionnaires were retrieved. Six research questions were raised for the study. While research question 1 and 2 were answered directly, questions 3, 4, 5 and 6 were hypothesized. The demographic variables were carried out using descriptive analysis (simple percentage, frequency, Mean and Standard Deviation) while t-test and ANOVA was used to test the hypotheses.
The findings revealed that most of the respondents cumulatively had low perception about guidance and counselling services in their schools. Most importantly, the students felt that counsellors are too strict in their decisions and so don’t discuss any issue with them (with mean score = 2.36). On the other hand, Most of the respondents had high attitude towards guidance and counselling services in their schools. Most importantly,the students agreed that “the career week organized by the counsellors assisted me in my choice of career” (with Mean score = 3.56). There is no significant difference (P>0.05) in the perception and attitude of students towards utilising guidance and counselling services in schools by gender. However, there is significance difference (p<0.05) in the perception and attitude of secondary school students towards guidance and counselling services by age. Unlike in the perception, the attitude of the students between 23 years and above are higher than that of “15-18 years” and “19-22 years” which have similar attitude. There is a need for the effect of counselors to be felt in the schools; by creating a conducive and friendly atmosphere in reaching out to the students, especially at the time they need counselling services.
