The Auditor-General's report on the public accounts of Ghana's ministries, departments and other agencies for the year ended 31 December 2025 found that 10,730 public basic schools in 13 regions had no classroom blocks.
The finding, from a review of Ghana Education Service (GES) infrastructure records, is in paragraphs 66–67 and 772–778 of the report, signed on 9 June 2026 by then Auditor-General Johnson Akuamoah Asiedu and now published on the Audit Service website.
A table on page 222 splits the 10,730 into 3,687 schools under trees, 5,001 under sheds, and 2,042 in "other shelters (churches and combination of 2 or more classes)". The three columns add to 10,730.
The 2027 Budget Statement, presented to Parliament on 12 November, cites "the 2025 Auditor-General's Report" for the same finding but prints 10,370 schools, not 10,730. That is 360 schools, or 3.4%, fewer than the report it quotes.
The enrolment total in both documents is the same, 3,050,808, and the Budget also repeats the 2,042 schools that combine classes. It does not mention churches, and it does not explain the discrepancy.
The gap matters because the Budget is the government's own account of why money is needed. Paragraph 1354 sits in the education chapter and is offered as evidence of a classroom deficit. If later briefs, speeches or committee notes copy 10,370, they will be copying a figure that is not in the Auditor-General's table.
The regional pattern in that table is stark. The Northern Region alone accounts for 2,900 of the 10,730 schools, or 27.0%: 1,174 under trees, 969 under sheds and 757 in other shelters. Oti (1,230) and Upper West (1,210) follow.
Greater Accra is listed with 127 such schools, Ashanti with 110, and Bono East with 31. The table covers 13 of Ghana's 16 regions. It does not include Bono, Eastern or North East, and it does not say why.
The legal hook is plain. The Auditor-General cites Article 38 of the 1992 Constitution and section 36 of the Pre-Tertiary Education Act, 2020 (Act 1049), which says the Education Service "shall construct, equip and maintain" public basic and senior high schools.
The report says the lack of classroom blocks exposed pupils and teachers to "adverse weather conditions, safety risks and the ultimate effect of poor learning outcomes", and recommended that the minister for education and the director-general of education "prioritize the provision of classroom blocks to the affected schools".
Management's recorded response was not a classroom programme. In paragraph 777, management said the Ministry of Education, in consultation with the Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFund), had "made provision in the 2026 budget for the provision of furniture to some Basic Schools across the country" and "would continue to engage the Ministry of Education for further action".
The Auditor-General acknowledged the response and "reiterated our recommendation for compliance" (para 778). Furniture does not put walls around a school under a tree.
The 2027 Budget, a day old, allocates GHS 11.2 billion to GETFund "to support the development of educational infrastructure" (para 1560), out of GHS 48 billion for the Ministry of Education. That allocation is not a plan to close the 10,730-school gap, and the statement does not say how many classroom blocks will be built, where, or by when.
If every cedi of the GHS 11.2 billion were spent on these schools alone, which it will not be, it would come to about GHS 1.04 million per school. That is a scale check, not a government target.
Two caveats sit on the enrolment figure that both documents repeat. The 13 regional enrolment numbers add exactly to 3,050,808, so the total is not a typo.
But if that column were the number of pupils only in the 10,730 schools without classroom blocks, some implied class sizes would not be believable: about 6,900 pupils per school in Bono East (31 schools, 214,470 enrolment) and about 5,000 in Ashanti (110 schools, 553,253), against about 56 in the Northern Region (2,900 schools, 163,283). The report does not define the column.
Until GES or the Audit Service does, 3,050,808 should be quoted as the table's total, not as a verified headcount of children learning under trees. A smaller inconsistency is in the "shift" remarks: the table lists 23 schools on shift in Central and 22 in Greater Accra, which add to 45, but the sub-total line says 55.
None of this requires a new audit. It requires the finance ministry to align paragraph 1354 with the report it cites, and the education ministry to answer the recommendation that was already on the record in June: classroom blocks, not only furniture, for the schools the Auditor-General counted as 10,730.