Provide counselling, therapy services for schools
The Girls Excellence Movement (GEM), a non-profit youth organisation, has appealed to the government to provide professional counselling and therapy services for young people in schools to help improve on their academic performance.
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A survey conducted by GEM involving 2,000 girls in 15 schools across five regions revealed that majority of the girls were dealing with different types of anxiety, trauma, flashbacks and other mental health issues by themselves and not sharing with adults at home.
The Founder and Executive Director of GEM, Ms Juliana Kplorfia, who made the appeal, explained that although some schools had counselling units, the units tended to focus on career guidance.
She said there was the need to add trauma therapy by trained professionals, with the necessary resources, to enable students to develop healthy coping skills for managing stress, anxiety and other difficult emotions.
She said there was the strong need to have trained counsellors in schools because young people dealt with a lot of emotions and they needed external voices to guide them in managing those emotions. She explained that young people who came from homes where the environment was not comfortable or friendly for them to share unpopular ideas or thoughts that they were battling with would need counsellors to guide them to deal with those things properly, especially at the adolescent level.
Ms Kplorfia said during adolescence, children were now developing their personalities and forming their perceptions of things around them by trying to understand society and their roles, noting that all came with a lot of questions on their minds.
Additionally, she pointed out that, children’s environment, made up of friends, peers, social media and other information outlets, gave them a lot of conflicting information which they needed to understand for them to make informed choices to develop their personalities properly in the environment.
Therefore, they needed guidance in the form of standards with which to measure information, from friends and the outside world. She noted that, unfortunately, many of them were sometimes not comfortable getting those pieces of advice from their parents or probably particular parents were not open enough for the children to ask all the probing questions.
Furthermore, Ms Kplorfia said, a child who could not ask questions at home would seek answers from her friends and the outside world and might end up taking decisions that conflicted with the family’s values.
She said young people spent more time in school than at home and, therefore, a well-resourced counselling unit would help them with the answers they needed because sometimes at home parents were too busy to listen.
She noted that although some parents were willing and listened to their children to provide them guidance, those parents were not professionals to be able to deal with trauma and so might end up worsening the situation or blaming the victim.
Other parents, she said, might just trivialise the issues and not give any proper counselling.
“The fact that adults went through that does not mean children should be allowed to go through that. Children need to be guided. They need that professional therapy so that they can do better in school and become better adults,” she added.
Another observation she made was that some children had been abused already and they did not feel comfortable to share their ordeals at home to get help.
Therefore, when such children were in school, it was expected that the school system would have a way of guiding them to deal with the trauma and the after effects of the abuse to enable them to concentrate on academics to produce the expected results, she said.
Ms Kplorfia further recommended that schools should have at least four trained counsellors. She said most schools had only one counsellor who was usually overwhelmed by the large population of the school, coupled with teaching and marking assignments, for which reason they had no time left for counselling.
She also appealed to parents to open up and listen to their children, adding that when children were helped to handle difficult emotions and mental health issues properly, they had clearer minds that impacted positively on their academic performance.
