Hanoi, Vietnam · est. 2018 · PrivateKey facts
Accreditations and programmes verified against official registries
CIS · accreditationCollege Board · authorised programmeCambridge · IGCSE, A-Level · authorised programmeVinschool · school is part of the networkWhat stands behind each entry
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 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 →Part of the University of Cambridge. It allows a school to teach the Cambridge programmes and to enter pupils for the exams. There are four stages and they are authorised separately: primary, lower secondary, IGCSE and A Level. If the stages are known they are named in the line below; if that line is missing, the school does not publish them, and the Cambridge registry does not show stages either - it gives only the name of the centre, the country and whether private candidates are accepted. Cambridge calls what it does registration rather than accreditation, and the network holds about ten thousand schools.
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: IGCSE (ages 14-16), A-Level (ages 16-18). IGCSE means exams at around Year 10 or 11, the British counterpart of a lower secondary leaving certificate. A-Level is the senior years, and their results are what British and many other universities admit on.
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.
Vinschool is the school system of the Vietnamese corporation Vingroup itself, not a franchise and not the brand of an outside operator: the site calls it a not-for-profit all-through system run by the parent company and funded by it. The year of foundation given is 2013. The numbers of campuses and pupils differ across pages and we give all four: the English section about the system gives 43 campuses and 36,000 pupils, a page on the edurun subdomain 54 campuses and nearly 48,000, the Vietnamese home page 56 sites and nearly 50,000, and the English questions and answers section 61 campuses and more than 50,000. The geography according to the site: Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Hai Phong, Thanh Hoa, Hung Yen, Phu Quoc. The stages run from kindergarten to upper secondary school. The programme is built as a combination of the Vietnamese state curriculum and the Cambridge one, and the site calls Vinschool the first school system in the country to receive the ministry's permission for this; rights to the International Preschool Curriculum, IGCSE and AS/A Level subjects and Advanced Placement courses are claimed. There are two tracks: a standard one, where the Cambridge subjects are taught in Vietnamese, and an advanced one, where the specialist subjects are taught in English. CIS accreditation.
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.