Gelisim Koleji is a private day school in Ulukent, on the Menemen road about 8 km from Karsiyaka in Izmir. It was founded in 1996 by Serdar Oner, a child development and education specialist, and continues the Gelisim Karsiyaka nursery that had opened in 1987. The school spent its first two years in a building in Karsiyaka and then moved to its own 25-acre campus in Ulukent; the investment behind it is Gelisim Special Education Services and Consulting Inc., founded by Serdar Oner and Hakan Oner. The school was planned as one route from kindergarten to grade 12 and on to university, and the high school opened in the 2004-2005 academic year with the first primary graduates. The high school is an Anatolian high school following the national curriculum, with College Board Advanced Placement courses on top of it. Teaching is in Turkish; the school describes a language programme built to European standards, with English phonics from the age of four and German and Italian as second foreign languages, and it lists Cambridge English examinations, Junior TOEFL, TOEFL, IELTS and SAT among the tests its students sit. The school also belongs to the German PASCH network as a Fit school, which means German is taught as a subject here. Two nursery units in Cigli, IAOSB Gelisim Cocukevi 1 and 2, belong to the same school but are kindergartens.
Key facts
Tuition
≈ $9 687–17 399 a year
467 650–839 921 TRY
Programmes
AP · National programme
Languages of instruction
Turkish
Languages taught
English, German, Italian
About the fees The figures are the school's basic tuition for the 2026-2027 academic year, stated without VAT, which is how the school publishes them. The cheapest year is grade 8 at 467,650 lira and the most expensive are grades 9, 10 and 11 at 839,921 lira; grades 1 and 5 cost 799,445 lira and grade 12 costs 487,856 lira. VAT of 10 per cent is added on top, so with tax the range runs from 514,415 to 923,913 lira. Meals are charged separately at 165,750 lira plus VAT a year, and in the graduating years supervised study sessions cost a further 74,559 lira plus VAT. Siblings get a 10 per cent discount on the younger child. Meal fees are paid as a quarter on registration and nine instalments after that.
Admissions For the kindergarten there is a preliminary meeting with the parents and a getting-to-know session with the child, in which age and development are assessed; places are then confirmed in the order applications arrive. For the high school the school runs a separate registration for grade 9 candidates and another for the middle years of the high school, with an online pre-application form for both, and it keeps a separate page for scholarship conditions. Exact entry requirements for the high school are not printed on the site.
Stages and year groups Four stages share one campus: kindergarten, primary school, middle school and the Anatolian high school. Classes are organised for at most 24 students. The primary and middle section has 30 classrooms and the high school another 30. The high school has been running since the 2004-2005 academic year and prepares students for the national university examination, with Advanced Placement courses in the senior years.
Address Menemen Yolu, Ulukent, Menemen, İzmir
Accreditations and programmes verified against official registries
College Board · authorised programmeThe school is listed in the College Board AP Course Ledger for 2025-2026 under number 696344. It describes the Advanced Placement programme itself on a page of its own, explaining that these are university-level courses whose examinations are set by the College Board, and it puts the College Board and Advanced Placement first in the list of its international links. The school does not publish its own centre number.
school is in an official registryconfirmed by a school document, by membership or by taking part in a networkclaimed by the school, no confirmation, not counted in the scoreGuide to all organisations → What stands behind each entry
College BoardCollege Board, the AP programme
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 →AP
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.
National programme
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.
Exams and destinations from the school's official website
The school publishes nothing about where its leavers go: no share going on to university, no exam results, no list of universities.
Facilities from the school's official website
·Swimming poolnot stated on the website
✓Sports hall
✓Laboratories
✓Theatre or assembly hall
✓Library
✓Catering
·School transportnot stated on the website
·Boardingnot stated on the website
Also on site: Sports ground or field · Art studio · Playground
Campus: The campus covers 25 acres on the Menemen road, 8 km from Karsiyaka: a primary building, a kindergarten building, a high school building, an administration building, painting and ceramics studios, a 2,500 square metre indoor sports complex, outdoor sports grounds, a cafe, a pond, an auditorium, a shop and a bookshop. There is a riding arena with stables, and students help the grooms and gardeners look after the horses and the birds. The stone buildings that now hold the art studios, the administration and the kindergarten were built by French engineers as a telegraph station while the railway was laid in Ottoman times, served as a headquarters during the war of independence, worked as a primary school until 1970 and were restored by the school in their original form.
Clubs and activities: list on the school website
Teaching staff
The school publishes neither the number of its teachers nor their qualifications.
Safety and wellbeing from the school's official website
The school says nothing on its website about security, medical care or pupil support.
Reviews
No reviews yet. The community rating counts towards the score once a school has five verified reviews - until then we do not show a zero, so as not to mislead.
Criteria breakdown criterion weight in brackets
Academics and programmes (16%)63 Community rating (16%)no dataparent reviews are needed: the criterion switches on at the fifth verified one Exams and destinations (12%) scored on disclosed data55 Safety and wellbeing (12%) scored on disclosed data55 Accreditation and verifiability (10%)85 Teaching staff (10%) scored on disclosed data55 Facilities (10%) scored on disclosed data85 Clubs and activities (8%) scored on disclosed data78 "Scored on disclosed data" stands where we count only what the school has written about itself on its own site: exams and destinations, safety and wellbeing, teaching staff, facilities, clubs and activities. A low score here means the school does not write about this, not that the school does not have it: a school with good security and a sparse site will score low. A school can fill in its profile, and the score will be counted again.
The score is counted from 8 of the 9 criteria.Only those with checkable data count: programmes and accreditations from official registers, the fee from a published price list. Where it says "scored on the median", the school has no data and the middle of the list is put in its place, so that a gap gives no advantage. Admissions, teaching staff and reviews come in as their data arrives.
The full methodology → Similar schools in the country
Izmir, Turkey · est. 1996 · Private