‘Students need guidance, counselling service ’
The Chief Executive of the Ga East Municipal Assembly, Mr Kwao Sackey, has said the absence of counsellors in most junior high schools (JHSs) is a contributory factor to the inability of some candidates to gain admission to senior high schools even though they might have performed well.
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“Most students did not gain admission to senior high schools not because they did not perform well but because there was no professional guidance counsellors in those schools to guide the students to select the right schools,” he pointed out.
Mr Sackey said this when he addressed a dinner used to launch the Counsellor for Each School in Ghana (CESIGH), an initiative to collaborate with the Ministry of Education, the Ghana Education Service and other stakeholders, to reach every child with guidance and counselling services.
Pilot project
The initiative, launched by the Technology Ubiquity, Counselling and Clean Environment in Education (TUCEE), a non-governmental organisation, focuses on achieving quality education through the promotion and provision of quality and comprehensive child-centred guidance and counselling programmes in schools.
The initiative, being piloted in the Ga East Municipal Assembly in 40 basic schools, is aimed at attaining its objective of a counsellor per school by 2017.
Selection of schools
Mr Sackey said during the selection of senior high schools by the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) candidates, it was common to see a candidate selecting a school like Achimota for his first, second and third choices “because that is what their friends have done. They do this without regards to their own strengths and weaknesses.”
He said situation such as that could have been avoided if counsellors were in schools to guide both the teachers and the students.
Significance of counsellors
Mr Sackey, therefore, said the significance of counsellors in schools could not be overemphasised as they served as “conductors and transmitters of information to provide school-wide success for all students. They have been and will continue to be in the forefront of efforts to assist students to respond to challenges they are confronted with through comprehensive guidance and counselling programmes.”
He attributed the inability of parents to have time for their children, coupled with the inadequate counselling services in most schools to rising levels of social vices such as armed robbery, sexual immorality and drug addiction as confirmed by the Anamuah-Mensah Committee on Educational Review (MoE 2007).
He was happy that TUCEE had selected the district assembly to pilot the project and pledged his support to make sure that the project achieved its goal of transforming the lives of Ghanaian children.
Explaining the project, the Chief Executive Officer of TUCEE, Mrs Cecilia Tutu-Danquah, said the project would provide students, teachers and parents an opportunity to address a wide range of interpersonal factors, behavioural concerns and crisis that negatively impacted the spiritual, social and academic performance of schoolchildren.
She said lots of children were going through stress and emotional trauma and, therefore, would need counsellors to help them, adding: “It is for this reason that the CESIGH project is being introduced to train counsellors to help attend to the child’s psychological needs.”