İstanbul ENKA Schools
Istanbul, Turkey · est. 1996 · PrivateThe school was founded in 1996 and occupies a single campus in Istinye, inside the Sadi Gulcelik sports complex. It teaches from pre-school through grade twelve as a coeducational day school and every graduate receives the Turkish National Diploma. Turkish and English are both languages of instruction: high school mathematics and science are taught in English, and every student studies a third language, German or French, from grade five to grade twelve. The school states that it was the first Turkish school authorised by the International Baccalaureate for the Primary Years Programme, that the primary school follows the PYP alongside the Turkish national curriculum and the middle school the MYP. The high school runs two lines, an Anatolian high school and a science and technology high school, and Advanced Placement courses are offered in grades eleven and twelve under what the school calls an open enrollment policy for students meeting the minimum criteria. Child protection is covered by the school's own written policy, which it aligns with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and with the International Taskforce on Child Protection; the child protection team includes the deputy head and the school psychologist. School teams train together with the ENKA Sports Club. The school is part of the ENKA Schools group.
Key facts
Accreditations and programmes verified against official registries
College Board · authorised programmeENKA Okulları · school is part of the networkWhat stands behind each entry
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 →The International Baccalaureate: programmes of a Swiss organisation, among the most widely recognised school programmes in the world. Each stage is authorised separately, so a school may hold one of them, two, or all four. 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.
What this means for this school. Authorisation for each stage is granted by the organisation itself after an on-site visit, and a school has to go through it again every few years. Every authorised school in the world stands in the open register at ibo.org, where the status can be checked independently. The IB diploma is awarded by the organisation rather than by the school, and the papers are marked by external examiners, so a leaver's grade does not depend on how strict their own school is with them.
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.
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.