Guidance and Counseling Services in Schools of Bangladesh: An Exploratory Study

The study aims to give an overview of available guidance and counseling services in schools of Bangladesh. The study was qualitative in nature. As the underlying motivation of the study was to gain insights about the nature of existing situation of counseling services in schools of Bangladesh, hence the authors gathered information from all categories of school available within the country. A total of 10 categories of schools were selected. Two schools from each category were selected purposively on the basis of accessibility and availability of the school administrator, teachers and students for detailed interviews. A semi-structured interview schedule was used to collect data from school administrators, teachers and students. School documents like student profile, curriculum, syllabus, event records as well as administrative and academic service records were also surveyed to get an in-depth understanding about the available counseling services in the respected schools. It is found that there is a lack of formal program for guidance and counseling. Some sort of service is provided to students but those are not planned, organized and holistic. Further, those are not readily intent for counseling purpose. Moreover, schools did not have any trained personal, solely responsible for such services.