ENKA Schools İstanbul
Istanbul, Turkey · est. 1996 · PrivateA private non-profit day school opened in 1996 and run by the ENKA Foundation. It teaches children from pre-kindergarten to grade 12 in mixed classes; students are mostly Turkish citizens, around ten per cent of them with dual citizenship. The base is the Turkish Ministry of National Education curriculum, which ends in the Turkish national diploma, with three IB programmes layered on top. In grades 11 and 12 the school runs College Board Advanced Placement courses on an open enrolment policy for students who meet the minimum criteria. It belongs to the ENKA group, which has two further schools, in Adapazarı and Kocaeli; those schools' figures do not belong to the Istanbul one.
Key facts
Accreditations and programmes verified against official registries
IB · PYP, MYP, DP · authorised programmeCIS · accreditationNEASC · accreditationENKA Okulları · school is part of the networkWhat stands behind each entry
A Swiss non-profit, working since 1968. Its programmes are among the most widely recognised school programmes in the world. Authorisation is granted stage by stage, so a school with the final stage does not necessarily run the younger ones; which stages this school holds is set out in the line below.
What the badge means for this school. The school is allowed to run this programme and to award its certificate. This is a confirmation of the programme, not a judgement on the school as a whole. The entry stands in the organisation's public register - anyone can check it. At this school: PYP (ages 3-12), MYP (ages 11-16), DP (ages 16-19). PYP is the primary stage, ages 3 to 12. It is not a set of subjects but a frame for the whole school: learning is built around lines of inquiry, and there are no exams at the end. MYP is the middle stage, ages 11 to 16. There are no exams here either; at the end an optional electronic assessment of pupils' work is possible. DP is the final stage, ages 16 to 19: six subjects plus a compulsory core of theory of knowledge, an extended essay and CAS. The diploma is accepted by universities all over the world, and in a number of countries it counts for admission on the same footing as the local leaving certificate.
Register to check for yourself, and the full guide →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 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 accreditation working since 1885. For international schools it uses an approach where the visitors look first at live lessons rather than at folders of paperwork: the team works in the school for about a week. It is the only one here whose public directory honestly separates accredited schools from candidates.
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 →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.
Schools of the ENKA foundation (ENKA Vakfı): the Istanbul school is called a private school of the foundation outright by its own site, which dates its founding to 1996. There are three schools. The Istanbul one stands on the European shore, in the Enka Sadi Gülçelik sports complex on fifty thousand square metres; it calls itself the first school in Turkey with IB PYP authorisation and is accredited by the Council of International Schools and the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. The Adapazarı one was opened in 1999, right after the Marmara earthquake, for pupils who had suffered in it: its primary school runs the PYP, its middle school and its Anadolu high school are working towards the MYP, and its science and technology high school is new. The third school is in Kocaeli. The network teaches bilingually, in English and in Turkish depending on the subject, and writes that between eighty and ninety per cent of its leavers go on to study abroad.
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.