Relationship Between Personnel Management And Students’ Academic Performance in Ondo State Public Secondary Schools, Nigeria

This study examined the extent of personnel management and the level of academic performance of secondary schools’ students in Ondo State. The study also examined the relationship between personnel management and academic performance of students. The study adopted the descriptive research design of the survey type. The population of the study consisted of 16,563 public secondary school teachers in 304 public secondary schools in Ondo state. The sample comprised 900 teachers selected from 36 secondary schools in Ondo State using multistage sampling procedure. Two sets of instruments tagged personnel management questionnaire (PMQ) and an inventory on Senior Secondary School Certificate Examination Result (ISSCER) were used for the study. The two instruments were validated by experts in Educational management and Test and Measurement to determine the appropriateness in order to ensure the face and content validity of the instrument. Test retest method of reliability was used to ascertain the reliability of the PMQ and a reliability coefficient of 0.81 was obtained. The research questions were answered using frequency count and percentage score while Pearson Product Moment correlation was used to test the hypothesis. The findings revealed that the level of personnel management in Ondo State was moderate and academic performance of students in Ondo State was fair. It was recommended that teachers should be motivated through prompt payment of salaries, promotion as and when due and other welfare packages should be paid in order to enhance good academic performance of secondary school students in Ondo State.


Introduction
Education has been identified as a veritable tool for building and transformation of individuals to acquire appropriate information, skills and competence required survival in any given society; and it has been the major driving force for development and continuity in any society. The contraction of the world to a global village by improvement in science and technology has made the provision or investment in education a responsibility that governments can no longer treat with levity. This is because people who are not educated cannot contribute significantly in the task of nation building. Besides, people's inability to perform social roles make societal survival a difficult task or even impossible especially as the latter becomes more complex and sophisticated (Igbineweka, 2004).
Education can be defined as a systematic instruction for the development of character or mental power. (Rao, 2001) saw the need to educate the populace to make them better citizens that could be useful to the nation. Education is synonymous to knowledge acquisition, learning, instruction, teaching, and guidance. The quality and quantity of human resources have direct impact on the success of every educational system because, without human effort all other factors are ineffective. Considering governments' investment in education, its output in terms of quality of students has been observed to be unequal with government expenditure. The poor academic performance has been noticed in the senior secondary school external examinations in the recent years. It is sad to know that this crucial level of education is faced with series of challenges. Common among these challenges is the poor academic performance of students in Senior School Certificate Examination (SSCE). The poor performance in West African Examination Council (WAEC) has been a source of concern for parents, guardian and other stakeholders in the education industry considering the inputs by the parents and government in educating the students. Owadie (2011) reported the displeasure of the stakeholders and the public about the low performance of students in WAEC and National Examination Council (NECO). Owadie (2012) gave the analysis of students' performance in WAEC and NECO examinations written in May/June,2012 as bad; as 38% of the students passed at credit level, Mathematics and English inclusive, in all states of the Federation. Eguridu (2015) supported the inadequacy to perform by the students in 2013 external examination. The students scored only 36.57% and 31.38% in English Language and Mathematics, respectively. All these negatives are contrary to the stipulated policy in the National Policy on Education (NPE, 2004), which states that 60% of students must excel in their external examination, especially in English and Mathematics being core subjects. The performance of the South West in the SSCE in the last five years showed that South West States, Ondo state inclusive performed better than other regions in their well-publicized rating. In all these years, Ondo state has not made it to the list of top 10 States in West African Examination Performance table.
The percentage of students who passed the examination with a minimum of credit in at least five (5) subjects, which include Mathematics and English Language in West African Examination Council, for candidates in Ondo State was 21% in 2009, 30.18% in 2010, 30.70% in 2011, 37.97% in 2012 across government-owned secondary schools. The situation was not so different in 2013. In 2014, the percentage of candidates who obtained 5 credits and above including English Language and Mathematics was 32.40% (Ondo State Ministry of Education, 2016). This placed Ondo state in the 14th position among the States of the Federation and the Federal Capital Territory in 2015 results released by West African Examination Council. This outcome calls for improvement in student academic performance.
The consequence of the poor academic performance of students in West African Examination Council results shows that majority of the students must have been denied an opportunity to gain admission into higher Institutions. Resulting from the observed decline in the academic performance of students in public secondary schools in Ondo state, one marvels if the high failure rate of the students is not a reflection of the personnel management in the schools. In other words, poor personnel management could be the major reason for the observed poor academic performance of students. Antonio (2002) viewed Personnel management as all a leader could do to stimulate and promote the effectiveness of workers to facilitate the overall goal of the organization. Oyedeji (2012) perceived personnel management as one of the keys to the effective operation of any organization. According to Durosaro and Ogunsaju (2002), personnel management spans the recruitment, development, and motivation of the human resources required by an organization in order to achieve its set objectives. They also see it as thorough mobilization of workers and as well screening for efficient result of realizing the set goals of the establishment.
Personnel management in education is the function of getting things done through people who are the staff of an institution or educational setting. The value of human resources in education is so tremendous that every school principal and head of department ought to manage well. In other words, while managing human being, the principal should not allow lapses or corruption to foster among the staff. He should be fair and firm to the staff at the appropriate time.
To realize educational outcomes in schools, the school principals, teaching staff, non-teaching staff and students have to carry out various activities and assignments to ensure students meaningful learning. These various activities and assignments must be planned, organized, directed, supervised, controlled and coordinated in order to accomplish academic goals and objectives in schools. A teacher who is very sound, skillful and hardworking, having ability of impacting well into the lives of the student will help student a lot in becoming successful. Leth (2004) saw a sound relationship between good organization of the school and students' success at large. The school leader and his team must strategize to ensure the progress of the candidates in the school.  opined that performance of students is dependent on the good leadership and administrative competence and strategies provided by the leader by being firm, focus and democratic in his approach.
The leader's work is all embracing ranging from overseeing the school, the physical material, and human resources, and also maintaining a good relationship within and outside the school. Adeleke (2001) and Onifade (2004) reiterated that a default in the leader managing the affairs of the school may result in inability to record success in the school.
Secondary School Students' academic performance according to Fadipe (2000) takes into cognizance both quality and quantity of the internal and external result achieved. It implies that it is not just the number of students that scored good grades that matters but how competent the students are in meeting the academic demands of tertiary education. Recent happenings and occurrences at the level of secondary school, and even other levels of education have left many scholars in panic today and Ondo state is not left out. Students find themselves staying at home for months due to industrial action embarked upon by their teachers as a result of non-payment of salaries, teachers' absenteeism from work due to lack of supervision, teachers using the same method of teaching for many years without going for training or refresher course to update their knowledge. In a bid to control all these, which is affecting the academic performance of students, careful management of personnel is therefore imperative.

Purpose of the Study
The purpose of the study was to examine the relationship between personnel management and academic performance of public secondary school students in Ondo state. The study also examined the level of principals' personnel management and the level of academic performance of students.

Research Questions
The following research questions were raised for the study: i. What is the level of personnel management in Secondary School in Ondo state? ii. What is the level of students' academic performance in Ondo state?

Research Hypothesis
This hypothesis was formulated in the study: i. There is no significant relationship between personnel management and students' academic performance in Ondo state.

Methodology
The descriptive research design of the survey type was adopted in this study. The population for the study consisted of 16,563 secondary school teachers and 304 principals in all the 304 secondary schools in Ondo State, Nigeria as at the time of this study. The sample for the study consisted of 900 teachers to assess personnel management practices using multistage sampling procedure. The 900 teachers were drawn from 36 public secondary schools in Ondo State.
In stage one, three Local governments were selected from each of the three senatorial districts using stratified random sampling technique. In stage two, four public secondary schools were selected from each of the nine local governments chosen for the study using simple random sampling technique. In stage three, twenty-five teachers were selected from each of the 36 public secondary schools earlier selected using stratified random sampling technique and 36 principals were purposively selected for the study. In this study, two instruments were used to collect data for the study. The first one is tagged Personnel Management Questionnaire (PMQ) and the second one is an inventory on School Secondary School Certificate Examination result in the May/June, of 2013/2014, 2014/2015 and 2015/2016 session. The face and content validity procedures of the instruments were ensured by experts to ascertain the appropriateness and representation of contents in measuring what it is meant to measure. Test-retest method of reliability was used, the two sets of responses were correlated and analysed using the Pearson Moment Correlation to determine the reliability of the PMQ and co-efficient of 0.81 was obtained which was considered high enough to make the instrument reliable and useful for the study. Descriptive and inferential statistical tools were used to analyse the data collected. The hypothesis was tested at 0.05 level of significance.

Research Question 1
What is the level of students' academic performance in Ondo State?

Research Question 2
What is the level of personnel management in Secondary School in Ondo State?
In answering the question, respondents' scores on personnel management was used. Frequency counts, percentages, mean and standard deviation score were used to illustrate the responses of the respondents. To determine the level of personnel management (low, moderate and high), the mean score and standard deviation of the responses were used.
The low level of personnel management was determined by subtracting the standard deviation from the mean score ( Table 2 revealed the level of personnel management in secondary schools in Ondo State. The result showed that out of 900 respondents, 207 respondents representing 23.0 percent agreed that there is low level of personnel management. Those who agreed that personnel management is at moderate level were 592 respondents representing 65.8 percent while 101 respondents representing 11.2 percent agreed that personnel management is high. This showed that the level of personnel management in secondary schools was moderate.

Testing of Hypotheses:
The following null hypothesis was at 0.05 level of significance Hypothesis 1: There is no significant relationship between personnel management and students' academic performance.
In testing the hypothesis, data on personnel management were collected from the responses of the respondents to items under Section B of PMQ (item 1 -25) in the questionnaire. Students' academic performance was gotten via the inventory. Both were compared for statistical significance using Pearson Product Moment Correlation at 0.05 levels. The result is presented in Table 3.  Table 3 showed r-cal (0.615) is greater than r-table (0.325) at 0.05 level of significance. The null hypothesis is rejected. This implies that there is significant relationship between personnel management and students' academic performance.

Discussion
The study showed that the level of personnel management in Ondo State secondary schools was moderate. The probable reason why the level of personnel management is moderate might be due to the resources the present government expended on secondary education and recognition given the teaching profession. The finding also revealed that students' academic performance was moderate in Ondo state public secondary schools. This seems to be in line and consistent with findings of Akinsolu (2011) who found out that students' general academic performance in Nigeria was moderate. The study revealed a significant relationship between personnel management and students' academic performance. In other words, principal's personnel management have direct impact on academic performance of students. What may be responsible for these findings is the fact that secondary schools may not succeed in terms of academic performance without principal managing their personnel adequately. Students may not be able to perform well in their external examination organized by WAEC, if the principal fails to manage the personnel properly. This finding is in consonance with the findings of Katou (2008) and Feng (2005) who both found out that personnel management is positively correlated with students' academic performance.

Conclusion and Recommendation
From findings of the study, it was concluded that the level of personnel management were crucial factors that contributed to academic performance of students in Ondo State Secondary schools. In the view of the implications of the finding for ensuring quality products in secondary schools, it is highly recommended that: teachers should be motivated by promoting them as and when due, regular payment of salary and other welfare packages, recognition and award of excellence, in order to improve academic performance of students.