Bilfen Bahçeşehir Fen Lisesi

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.

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.

The state school programme of the country the school stands in: it is set by that country's ministry of education, which also licenses the school and awards the leaving certificate. That certificate is used for entry to local universities, and abroad it is matched to the local one.

What this means for this school. This entry does not count towards the score, and that is deliberate. Every lawful school in a country works to the national programme, so on its own it tells one school apart from no other - unlike the French, German or Russian programmes, which are carried abroad and confirmed by the register of their organisation. We show it because a parent needs to know what programme their child is taught and what certificate the child will get. Counting it would lift the whole ranking at once and still tell nobody apart.

A Turkish network above whose schools stands the commercial company Bilfen Eğitim Kurumları A.Ş.; the network holds education as one of the lines of business of the Bilfen group of companies, and there is no separate foundation above the schools. A school here means a separately licensed institution of one stage, so one address yields several schools: the network's own list names 27 kindergartens, 21 primary schools, 20 middle schools and 18 high schools in seven cities. At the high school level the network divides its schools by type as well: an Anadolu Lisesi and a Fen Lisesi stand as two different high schools with different names on one campus, and there are seven such pairs in the list - Ankara Çayyolu, Antalya, Bahçeşehir, Bursa, Iskenderun, Izmir and Kayseri. The cities the network calls its own: Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Bursa, Antalya, Kayseri and Iskenderun. The network issues no accreditation of its own: programmes and authorisations the campuses obtain each for itself.

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.