How we handle data
Every field on this site traces to a named source, and where we hold nothing the page says so rather than filling the gap. Fees appear only when a school publishes them, and we never estimate them. We publish no ratings and no enrolment figures, because we hold none. 126 records were dropped rather than guessed at, which is why the total reads 43,626 and not a round number.
Every source, with its publisher, year and link, is on the methodology and sources page.
What a record can say
Each school page carries one of these. It describes where the record came from, never how good the school is. Only the last can be earned, and only by the school itself.
The school appears on the Ministry of Education school register, 2023/24. Name, level, ownership, region and district are as the register has them. 25,842 schools sit here.
The school appears in a public school listing, either on its own or matched with a record on the register. That is where almost every telephone number comes from. 17,218 schools sit here.
A small number of tertiary and senior high entries come from public encyclopaedia records rather than either register, and say so. 20 schools sit here.
The institution appears in a list published by the Nursing and Midwifery Council of Ghana, Ghana Tertiary Education Commission and Ghana TVET Service. 748 records carry at least one such listing, and 546 of them come from no other source. Accreditation status and dates are shown only as the regulator publishes them.
Someone at the school wrote to us from a school address and confirmed the details, or corrected them. A confirmation overrides the register. No school holds this yet, because the directory has only just opened.
Which source each record came from
| Source | Schools | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Ministry register only | 25,842 | 59.2% |
| Public listing only | 12,668 | 29.0% |
| Ministry register, matched with a public listing | 4,550 | 10.4% |
| Listed by the Ghana Tertiary Education Commission | 230 | 0.5% |
| Listed by the Ghana TVET Service | 215 | 0.5% |
| Listed by the Nursing and Midwifery Council of Ghana | 101 | 0.2% |
| Public encyclopaedia entry | 20 | 0.0% |
What we hold, and what we do not
| Field | Schools with it | Coverage |
|---|---|---|
| Name and level | 43,626 | 100% |
| Region | 43,426 | 99.5% |
| District | 41,291 | 94.6% |
| Trusted position on the map | 37,896 | 86.9%, at the precision below |
| Mapped at the school itself | 17,957 | 41.2% |
| Telephone | 16,942 | 38.8% |
| Mapped at the school and reachable | 3,695 | 8.5% |
| Website | 38 | 0.1% |
| Fees | From schools | shown when the school publishes them, never estimated |
| Ratings | 0 | none held, none published |
| Enrolment | 0 | none held, none published |
2,135 records carry a region but no district. Almost all of those come from sources written before the 2019 re-districting, when six new regions were carved out of the old ten and dozens of districts were split. Rather than assign them to whichever new district looks closest, we leave the field empty and say so on the page.
How precise the map is
Every school is on the map, but not every pin is the school. The coordinates we started with were unreliable: 8,676 of 31,876 sat more than 60km from the middle of their own district, which is further than any district in Ghana is wide, and 11,204 records carried no coordinate at all. So the layer was rebuilt from open place and school position data, and from the records whose own coordinates already agreed with their neighbours. The sources are on the methodology page. None of it costs anything to use and none of it is guesswork dressed up as data.
Each pin now carries how precise it is, and the map draws the difference rather than implying one. A solid pin is the school’s own position. A hollow pin is the centre of its town or district, and says so when you open it. A school that claims its page can put the pin on its own gate, which is the only way this is ever exactly right.
| What the pin means | Schools | Share |
|---|---|---|
| The school's own position | 17,957 | 41.2% |
| The centre of its town | 4,258 | 9.8% |
| The centre of its district | 14,571 | 33.4% |
| The centre of its region only | 1,110 | 2.5% |
| Location approximate: differently named schools share one position, so no pin is drawn | 5,037 | 11.5% |
| Location untrusted: the position lies outside its stated region, so no pin is drawn | 147 | 0.3% |
| No position held | 546 | 1.3% |
What a basic school is, in this register
29,712 records, 68% of the directory, are recorded as basic. In the Ministry register that covers kindergarten, primary and junior high taught at one campus under one head. The register does not separate them and neither do we, so a filter for primary schools alone will miss most of Ghana. That is a property of the national data, not a gap we can close by guessing.
Questions people ask
- Where does this data come from?
- School name, level, ownership, region and district come from the Ministry of Education school register, 2023/24. Other details come from public school listings, a small number of public encyclopaedia records and the lists published by the Nursing and Midwifery Council of Ghana, Ghana Tertiary Education Commission and Ghana TVET Service, which also supply accreditation status and dates where they publish them. Every source is listed in full, with how the records are matched, on the methodology page.
- Do you publish school fees?
- Yes, when the school gives them to us. A school publishes its fees through its SchoolRegistry profile, and they appear on its page with the date it published them. We never estimate a fee. Where a directory shows you a fee range it did not collect, that range is an estimate dressed as a fact.
- Do you rate or rank schools?
- No. We publish no ratings, no stars and no scores, because we have measured nothing. The only ranking on the site is by how many schools a region or district holds, which is a count rather than a judgement.
- A detail about my school is wrong. How do I correct it?
- Write to data@schoolregistryghana.com from an address at the school, naming the school and the field that is wrong. A correction confirmed by the school replaces whatever the register says, and the page then reads Confirmed by the school.
- Why is my school's pin in the wrong place?
- Because we do not know exactly where it is. A hollow pin is the centre of the town or district the record is filed under, rather than the school, and the map says so when you open it. A solid pin is the school's own position. Some records show no pin at all and say Location approximate: either several differently named schools were given exactly the same position, or the position falls in a different region from the one the record names. We keep those coordinates in the data, draw no pin from them and use them for no distance or nearby list. Claiming the page lets you drop the pin on your own gate, which is the only way it will ever be exactly right.
- Why is so much of a school's page empty?
- Because no public register in Ghana holds it. Every school gets the same set of fields whether we have the answer or not, so you can see exactly what is known and what is not. Most of the blanks can only be answered by the school, and filling them is free.
- Why does the directory hold 43,626 schools rather than a round number?
- Because it is a count of records we can trace, not an estimate. 126 rows were dropped rather than published: 91 had no region we could place them in, 33 were page headings picked up by a scrape rather than schools, and 2 had no usable name.