Capacity building needs of school principals for the effective students’ personnel services in secondary schools in south east, Nigeria

This study is Capacity Building Needs of school principals for effective student personnel services in secondary schools in South East Nigeria.To achieve this purpose, three specific objectives and three corresponding research questions as well as two null hypotheses were formulated and tested at 0.05 level of significance guided this study. The design of the study was descriptive survey research design. The population of the study comprised all the principals and teachers in public secondary schools in five states of Abia, Anambra, Ebonyi, Enugu and Imo states in South-east geopolitical zone. The sample of the study was 1239, made up of 162 principals and 1077 teachers drawn from three states of Anambra, Eboni and Enugu states using proportionate simple random sampling techniques. The research instrument used to collect data for the study was questionnaire (Principals capacity building needs Questionnaire). Five experts, two from the department of education foundations, two from the department of arts education and one from measurement and evaluation, all from the faculty of education, university of Nigeria, Nsukka validated the instrument. Crombach Alpha method was used to compute the reliability coefficient of the PCBNQ. Mean and standard deviation were used to analyze the data collected for the study. Mean was used to answer research question one and two. Need Gap Index was used to answer research questions 3 while t-test was used to test the two null hypotheses at 0.05 level of significance. Major findings of the study were that school principals require capacities for effective student personnel and school principals perform poorly in all the capacities in student personnel management. The study also determined the capacity building needs of School principals for effective student management. Based on the findings, several recommendation were made: Government should organize and fund capacity building programmes for the retraining of school principals to upgrade the capacity to effectively perform their student personnel servies and sponsor school principals to attend compulsorily capacity building programmes, like workshops, seminars, symposia to acquire the required capacities for effective personnel management. Principals of secondary schools should utilize the findings of the study to seek for avenues to improve themselves through collaboration and other capacity building training strategies to enable them perform better in their responsibilities.