The adult literacy rate in Ghana was 65% in 2007, with males at 71.7% and females at 58.3%. Ghana has a 6-year primary education system beginning at age six, and, under the educational reforms implemented in 1987 and reformed in 2007, they pass on to a 3-year junior high school system. At the end of the 3rd year of junior high, there is a mandatory Basic Education Certificate Examination. Those continuing must complete the 3-year senior high school program and take an admission exam to enter any university or tertiary programme.

Presently, Ghana has 21,530 primary schools, 8,850 junior secondary schools, 900 senior secondary schools, 52 public training colleges, 5 private training colleges, 5 poly-technical institutions, 4 non-university public tertiary institutions, 8 public universities and over 45 private tertiary institutions. Most Ghanaians have relatively easy access to primary and secondary education. These numbers can be contrasted with the single university and handful of secondary and primary schools that existed at the time of independence in 1957. Ghana's spending on education has varied between 28-40% of its annual budget in the past decade. All teaching is done in English, mostly by qualified Ghanaian educators.

The courses taught at the primary or basic school level include English, Ghanaian language and culture, mathematics, environmental studies, social studies and French as a third language are added, integrated or general science, pre-vocational skills and pre-technical skills, religious and moral education, and physical activities such as music, dance and physical education. The senior high level school curriculum has core subjects and elective subjects of which students must take four the core subjects of English language, mathematics, integrated science (including science, agriculture and environmental studies) and social studies (economics, geography, history and government).

The high school students also choose 3 elective subjects from 5 available programmes: agriculture programme, general programme (arts or science option), business programme, vocational programme and technical programme. Apart from most primary and secondary schools which choose the Ghanaian system of schooling, there are also international schools such as the Ghana International School, Takoradi International School, Tema International School, Galaxy International School, The Roman Ridge School, the Lincoln Community School and SOS Hermann Gmeiner International College, which offer the International Baccalaureate, Advanced Level General Certificate of Education and the International General Certificate of Secondary Education (IGCSE).

With 83% of its children in school, Ghana currently has one of the highest school enrolment rates in West Africa. The ratio of girls to boys in the total education system is 1:0.96, which for a West African country is a considerable achievement. That said, some 500,000 children still remain out of school because of resource constraints in building schools, providing adequate textbooks and training new teachers.

The oldest university in Ghana, the University of Ghana, which was founded in 1948, had a total of about 29,754 students in 2008. Since Ghana's independence, the country has been one of the educational hot spots in sub-Saharan Africa and has played host to notables such as President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Alhaji Sir Dauda Jawara of The Gambia and Cyprian Ekwensi of Nigeria among others. Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has been chancellor of the University of Ghana since 2008.

Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, the second university to be established in Ghana, is the premier university of science and technology in Ghana and West Africa. It has very high international rating and has consistently been ranked the country's best university since 2008.