Pastors must train as professional Counselors

Mr Emmanuel Ketteku, Volta Regional Director of Education on Tuesday reminded Heads of Second Cycle Schools in the region that it was wrong for Pastors in their institutions to take up the Guidance and Counseling role unless they were professionally trained as such.

“Everybody wants to be the Guidance and Counselling Officer. It is not supposed to be so,” he asserted.

Mr Ketteku was addressing the opening session of a four-day capacity building workshop for Guidance and Counseling Coordinators and Assistant Heads of Second Cycle schools in the Volta region in Ho.

He, therefore, urged professionally trained Guidance and Counseling Officers to be assertive and professional in their approach to duty to prevent the invasion of their domain.

Mr Ketteku observed that many of the Guidance and Counselling Officers were downgrading their positions and eroding the respect of the profession because of their unprofessional approach to work.

“Guidance and Counselling is a dying schedule and no more as vibrant as before,” he said, asserting that the unit had proved to be useful when at its inception it helped arrest falling standards of education.

He further asserted that Guidance and Counselling officers, therefore, ought to demonstrate total leadership, purposefulness and bring new thinking and innovation to bear on their work.

“Be child-centred professionally and excellent and be 99.9 per cent on target, knowing that you are dealing with human beings,” Mr Ketteku said.

He reminded the Coordinators to guide each student to tell a good story about him or herself. “When we do this, then the child becomes a self-fulfilling personality.”

He blamed the lack of resources to Guidance and Counselling to a disconnection between those who plan strategies and those who implement those strategies. Mrs Elizabeth Kudjawu, Volta Regional Guidance and Counselling Coordinator urged her colleagues not to succumb to intimidation by heads of Schools but demonstrate the importance of Guidance and Counselling to making total personalities of their students.

Some of the Coordinators alleged that School authorities seemed not to appreciate the importance of guidance and counseling as vital in the holistic training of students.

They said the lip-service paid to the importance of guidance and counseling must find expression in the allocation of funds and logistics.

“On paper, guidance and counseling is given all the support but on the ground we have become desk officers rather than field officers,” one of them lamented.

The participants would be taken through the role and responsibilities of Coordinators at district and school levels, preparing action plans, career guidance, record and data keeping and evaluation.

They would also be enlightened on subject combination at Senior High School level and cut off point for tertiary level and report writing.