APU American International School, Da Nang
Da Nang, Vietnam · est. 2015 · PrivateKey facts
Accreditations and programmes verified against official registries
CIS · membershipCognia · accreditationCollege Board · authorised programmeAPU American International Schools · school is part of the networkWhat stands behind each entry
It accredits international schools and is a paying association at the same time. It examines governance and ownership, the curriculum, teaching, student wellbeing, staff and premises; a team of volunteers from other CIS accredited schools visits the school. Membership and accreditation are different things here, and schools confuse them more often than anything else.
What the badge means for this school. The school belongs to this organisation but has not been through its accreditation. The difference matters: membership is usually paid for and has no external inspection behind it. The entry is confirmed in the organisation's open directory.
Register to check for yourself, and the full guide →The widest-reaching American accreditation: some forty thousand schools in over a hundred countries. It accredits both individual schools and whole school systems. It also sells a paid membership with no inspection behind it, and that membership is often passed off as accreditation.
What the badge means for this school. The school has been through this organisation's accreditation. It was judged as a whole: governance, safeguarding, staff, premises, teaching. The entry stands in the organisation's public register - anyone can check it.
Register to check for yourself, and the full guide →An American organisation that allows a school to put the letters AP on a pupil's transcript. The permission is granted course by course and tied to a particular teacher, it has to be renewed every year, and College Board reads the course syllabus before granting it.
What the badge means for this school. The school is allowed to run advanced AP courses - not the school as a whole, but one by one: by subject and by teacher. Governance, safeguarding and the primary years are not part of that check. Which subjects are actually approved is visible in the ledger. The entry stands in the organisation's public register - anyone can check it.
Register to check for yourself, and the full guide →Advanced Placement: American advanced courses for the senior years. The exam for a course is set and marked by the College Board, not by the school. A good result is counted by American universities as a first-year course already passed, which saves a student time and money.
What this means for this school. A school does not get to call a course AP automatically: the College Board reads the course syllabus and approves it separately for every subject and every teacher, and the permission has to be renewed each year. Every approved school in the world is listed in the open AP Course Ledger, and this school's entry there stands as a line in the accreditation block above. How many courses a school is approved for, and in which subjects, the ledger does not show in its general listing. AP has no leaving certificate of its own: it sits on top of the school's main programme rather than being a separate system.
APU American International Schools - a Vietnamese school brand inside a structure which its own site calls APU Educational Development Group; Tran Nguyen Thi Binh is named as the founder. The site does not divide ownership, management and franchise: all the sites are presented as the group's own schools. The year of establishment disagrees on its own pages: the English history section names 2003, the Vietnamese subdomain 2004. The chronology of the sites by the site: 2003 - a school in Ho Chi Minh City, 2004 - the preschool and primary stages there, 2015 - entry into Da Nang, 2017 - the preschool and primary stages in Da Nang, the 2020/2021 school year - the launch of a bilingual programme in Da Nang. There are two cities and three addresses: Lac Long Quan and Lanh Binh Thang in Ho Chi Minh City, Tran Dai Nghia in Da Nang. In 2015 the same group founded American University in Vietnam. The stages run from preschool to grade 12, and the programmes are international, bilingual, integrated bilingual, summer, ELD, AP courses and College Bridge. The languages of instruction are English and Vietnamese.
What this means for this school. The network owns or operates the school. Its accreditation and programme authorisation the school obtains separately, in its own name.