Abstract:
Guidance and counselling has been recommended and popularized by the government through the
Ministry of Educa
tion, Science and Technology. Different Government of Kenya (GoK) reports
have made recommendations aimed at enhancing guidance and counselling. In 1971 the Ministry of
Education established a Guidance and Counselling section at the ministry headquarters.
Teacher
counsellors are trained in different institutions such as, public and private universities, middle l
evel
colleges and religious organizations. Each institution develops its own curriculum. Some schools
provide in
-
service training for their teacher
counsellors while others do not. This results in
differences in hours of exposure to train
ing in guidance and counselling
contents
.
The relationship
between the teacher counsellors’
hours of exposure to training in guidance and counselling and
professiona
lism in guidance and counselling has not been investigated.
The purpose of th
is
study
was to find out the relationship between hours of teacher counsellors exposure to training in
guidance and counselling
and professionalism in
the provision of
services
in secondary schools. Th
e
study
involved a sample of 25% of
the accessible population
from
randomly selected secondary
schools in Nairobi County in Kenya. The researcher used
the
ex
-
post facto
research design
.
A
questionnaire
was used to collect data from
teacher counsellors. A guidance and counselling room
observation checklist was completed by the
Head of Department (
HOD
)
guidance and counselling.
Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 17.0 was used to analyse the data
descriptively.
To te
st the null hypotheses, Pearson
’s
Product Moment Correlation coefficient (r) was used at
5%
alpha level
.
A
significant positive relationships between number of hours of exposure and (a)
application of counselling skills and technique
s
, (b) management of co
unselling resources and (c)
observation of ethics (r = 0.702, 0.813 and 0.342 respectively)
was reported
.
I
t was recommended
that there was need to have teachers who are adequately trained
in the management of resources,
application of counselling skills
,
and observation of counselling ethics in guidance and counselling