Unity Concord International School
Chiang Mai, Thailand · PrivateKey facts
Accreditations and programmes verified against official registries
ACS WASC · accreditationCollege Board · authorised programmeAmbassador Education Group · school is part of the networkWhat stands behind each entry
An American regional accreditation of the institution, working since 1962 and covering some 5,500 schools in California, the Pacific and Asia. It judges the whole school: a self-study, then a team visit. It gives the same status to supplementary and virtual programmes, so the category of an entry is worth checking separately.
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 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 →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.
A group with its own site, aegcm.com; all of its schools are in Chiang Mai. The site gives two dates that do not agree: the "About Us" section writes "Ambassador Education was founded in 2005", while the footer and the home page say "Providing Education in Chiang Mai for 30 Years" and "For over 30 years", and we give both. The "Our Schools" section lists six schools: Unity Concord International School (named the flagship), Americana Chinese International School, Ambassador Bilingual School, Ambassador Bilingual Academy, British Concordance International School (opened in September 2022) and Chiang Mai Educational Center. The programmes declared are American, British and Thai-English bilingual, from PreK to grade 12; pupils, in the words of the site, come from more than 30 countries. The site does not name owners or founders and nowhere says whether the group owns these schools or manages them, so ownership, management and franchise cannot be told apart from it.
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.