Abstract:
Considerably, school counseling is yet to be recognized as a profession in its own right, rather than a service ancillary to other educational programs. Hence, the purpose of this study was to examine the school counselors’ perceptions on guidance and counseling program: a case study of public primary schools in Kiambu County, Kenya. The objectives of the study were: to assess the school counselors’ perceptions towards their roles on guidance and counseling; to determine the school counselors’ perceptions towards skills and competence of a school counselor on guidance and counseling programs; and to identity factors that school counselors perceive as challenges to guidance and counseling in public primary schools in Kiambu County. A total of 82 school counselors from public primary schools in Kiambu County, Kenya participated in the study. Methodological, descriptive research design was used in the study with quota and purposive sampling techniques being adapted. For data collection, school counselors’ roles were measured using the Role perception scale (Reiner et al., 2009), skills and competency measure were adapted from work-related basic need satisfaction scale [W-BNS] (Van den Broeck, 2010), whilst self-administered questionnaire was developed by the researcher to measure the perceived challenges. Consequently, SPSS version 20 was used to analyze the data and the results established 62% were female and 38% male with an average of 44years (SD= 0.93). On the perceived roles of school counselors, the findings showed that the respondents perceived their roles to involve counseling students on various aspects of their school life, collaborating with teachers to present guidance curriculum lessons, assisting the school principal with identification and resolving students’ issues, needs, and problems, and working with a student at a time in a therapeutic clinical mode. In consideration of skills and competence of a school counselor, results of the study showed that the majority of school counselors perceived to have relatively good relatedness in the work place, but low levels of competency and moderate levels of autonomy. Moreover, perceived challenges included lack of designated private office for conducting guidance and counseling, lack of psychological supervision for the school counselors, the duality of roles, misconception of the meaning of guidance and counseling among the administration, lack of autonomy due to interference from school administration and other teachers, and lack of training or workshops on psychotherapy. Finally, this study recommended that school administrations provide designated location/rooms for guidance and counseling purpose only, school counselors should be relieved from performing teaching duties and be allowed enough time to undertake guidance and counseling, sensitization forums on the importance and purpose of guidance and counseling should be regularly done to school administrations, pupils, teachers, and parents, and trainings, workshops and other capacity building forums should be availed to school counselors regularly in order to increase their competence.