İSTEK Semiha Şakir Okulları

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.

The schools of the Istanbul foundation İSTEK İstanbul Eğitim ve Kültür Vakfı, established by Bedrettin Dalan in 1985; the first school of the foundation its pages name as the Semiha Şakır high school in Göztepe. The foundation exists separately from the schools and holds, besides them, Yeditepe University, opened in 1996: that is how it describes its own chain - from kindergarten to university and to work. A school, for the foundation, means a separately licensed institution of one stage, and at the high school level it divides them by type as well; its own count is 22 kindergartens, 22 primary schools, 22 middle schools, 20 high schools and 14 Fen high schools, that is, about a hundred institutions, and this is a count by stage on the same campuses rather than by address. The number of kindergartens, primary schools and middle schools is the same - 22 each - while there are two fewer high schools.

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.