Home vs Online IB Tutoring in Dubai: The Honest Comparison

Almost every Dubai parent asks this question in the wrong form. "Should we get a tutor at home or online?" sounds like a preference — a matter of taste, like choosing a restaurant. It is not. Home vs online IB tutoring in Dubai is a question about what a fixed amount of money and a fixed amount of your child's evening actually buy, and in a city built the way Dubai is built, the two options buy noticeably different things.

This article works through the comparison for International Baccalaureate families in Dubai: the Primary Years Programme, the Middle Years Programme and, where the stakes are highest, the Diploma Programme. It covers what each delivery mode is genuinely better at, the arithmetic of travel, what a small group changes, what you need at home for a video lesson not to be irritating, and how scheduling interacts with the Dubai school week, Ramadan and the exam calendar.

It also states our own position up front, because otherwise the rest reads as advocacy. IB Gram teaches UAE families online, one to one, over live video. We do not send tutors to homes anywhere in the UAE — that is an India-only service. So when you read the sections on in-home tutoring below, you are reading an account of a market we do not sell into. We have tried to describe it as it is, including where it beats us.

Those numbers matter to a tutoring decision for one reason: school fees are, for this academic year, a fixed quantity, while tutoring is the part of the education budget you still control. That makes it worth spending deliberately rather than reactively — and the delivery mode is the single biggest lever on what you get per dirham.

Home vs online IB tutoring in Dubai: the real question is what the hour buys

Strip the labels away and a tutoring hour contains four things: teaching time, the tutor's preparation, the tutor's committed-but-unteaching time, and your family's logistics. Online and in-home tutoring distribute those four differently, and the quoted rate tells you almost nothing about the distribution.

Teaching time is the only part that moves a grade. Preparation — reading your child's marked paper, building a question set from the errors in it, writing the follow-up — is what makes the teaching time land, and it is almost always unbilled. Committed-but-unteaching time is the tutor's travel, and it is billed, whether or not anyone names it. Logistics is your side of the ledger: who is home, which car is free, when dinner happens, whether a younger sibling has to be managed in the next room.

Rate bands in that table come from published provider pages and Bestimate's Tutoring Cost Dubai 2026 rate table, read in October 2026. They are market figures, not IB Gram's prices.

The gap between the two one-to-one bands is the whole commercial question, and almost all of it is travel rather than teaching.

Read the table and the honest conclusion is that in-home is not simply "the premium version of online". It is a different product with a different cost structure and a different failure mode. Online fails when the room is noisy and the student will not engage with a screen. In-home fails when the tutor is stuck on Al Khail Road and the lesson starts twenty minutes late, three weeks running.

How much of an in-home Dubai session is actually teaching?

Here is the arithmetic nobody in this market publishes. The numbers below are assumptions, labelled as such — put your own in and the shape does not change.

Suppose an in-home tutor charges AED 300 for a sixty-minute session, and the round trip to your home takes seventy minutes of driving plus parking and getting to your door. The tutor has committed roughly 130 minutes to earn AED 300. That is not a criticism of the tutor; it is the cost of the model, and any rational tutor prices travel in. What it means for you is that the rate is not AED 300 per teaching hour so much as AED 300 for a slot whose scarcity is set by geography.

Those four numbers are the whole reason the in-home band sits above the online one. Nobody is overcharging; the model simply contains something other than teaching, and you pay for it whether or not it is named.

Scarcity is the real consequence, and it shows up in three ways.

Slot availability collapses. A tutor who can fit three in-home sessions into an evening across one cluster of communities cannot fit three across the city. So the good in-home tutors concentrate: they take students who live near each other and near them. If your community is not on that list, you are competing for the awkward slots.

Lateness becomes structural. When travel sits inside the hour, a single delayed previous session or one bad crossing pushes everything back. A five o'clock start that becomes twenty past, four times in a term, is not bad luck; it is the model working as designed.

The exam-term squeeze is worst. In the weeks when you most want extra sessions, every family wants extra sessions, and the in-home tutor's capacity is capped by driving, not by willingness.

None of this means in-home is wrong. It means the thing you are paying extra for is presence in the room, and you should decide whether presence in the room is what your child's specific problem needs. For many Diploma problems it is not. For some it absolutely is, and we come to those.

If you are weighing the fee question in detail rather than the mode question, the pages on IB home tutor fees in Dubai and IGCSE home tutor fees in Dubai set out the bands by level, and our longer piece on IB home tutor fees in Dubai takes apart the monthly-package maths. The same arithmetic for the British track is in IGCSE tutor fees in Dubai, and the programme-level breakdown sits on our IB tutor cost page for Dubai.

Where the geography of Dubai decides the answer for you

Dubai is not a city where distance predicts travel time. What predicts travel time is how many constrained crossings sit between two points and when you attempt them. A tutor coming from Al Barsha to Dubai Marina in the late afternoon and the same tutor two hours later are two different propositions, and a tutor coming from Mirdif to Arabian Ranches is making a journey whose length depends almost entirely on Sheikh Zayed Road and Al Khail Road behaving.

The table below is not a travel-time table — we are not going to publish invented minutes. It is a table of the structural constraint in each case and the question you should ask before you agree to a weekday slot.

Every row in the right-hand column is a structural fact about a route, not a fault in a tutor, which is why it does not improve with goodwill or a bigger fee.

The pattern is simple once you see it. In-home tutoring works well when the tutor is already in your neighbourhood and badly when they are not, and no amount of goodwill changes that. Our area pages exist partly to make this visible before you commit — IB and IGCSE tutoring in Dubai Marina, tutoring in Arabian Ranches, tutoring in Dubai Hills Estate and tutoring in Al Barsha each describe the local picture rather than claiming blanket coverage, as do the pages for tutoring in Jumeirah Lake Towers, tutoring in Damac Hills and tutoring in Mirdif. If you are still choosing where to live, our piece on the best areas in Dubai for IB families looks at the same geography from the other direction.

Where online wins on the IB Diploma specifically

For most Diploma work, the online session is not a compromise. It is the better tool, for reasons that are specific to how the IB is assessed rather than general claims about technology.

Marked work is the raw material, and screens handle it better. The single most productive thing a DP tutor does is work through your child's most recent marked paper, finding the pattern in the lost marks. On a screen, that paper is open, annotated live in a colour the student can see, and saved afterwards. On a kitchen table it is a piece of paper with the tutor's handwriting on it, which is fine until the student wants to revisit it in week nine.

Past papers are a screen activity anyway. Timed practice, mark scheme comparison, flipping between a question and the examiner's wording — all of it is faster shared on a screen than passed back and forth.

Recordings exist. A student who has just had the method marks on a mechanics question explained properly can watch that explanation again the night before the paper. This is the advantage that in-home structurally cannot match, and in our experience it is the one families come to value most in the second year.

Specialist supply is not limited to your postcode. A DP Physics Higher Level tutor who has taught the course and coached against the Internal Assessment criteria is a rare skill set in any one city. Online, your choice of tutor is a choice of tutor. In-home, your choice of tutor is a choice from the subset who live within a drivable radius of your home and have a free slot — a much smaller set, and the narrowing bites hardest on exactly the niche subjects where expertise matters most.

Short sessions become viable. A thirty-minute session to fix one thing before a Thursday test is a sensible purchase online and an absurd one in-home, because nobody drives across Dubai for half an hour. That flexibility is worth more than it sounds during an exam term, when what a student needs is often small, specific and urgent.

The third row is the one families come to value most in the second year, and it has no in-home equivalent at all. If Higher Level Physics is the case in question, the IB DP Physics HL tutoring page for Dubai and the IB past papers practice page for Dubai describe how that work is actually run.

The relevant pages, if you want to see how the online model is set out per case, are IB online tutoring in Dubai, IGCSE online tutoring in Dubai and, for families outside the emirate, IB online tutoring in Abu Dhabi.

Where a tutor in the room still wins

We would rather say this clearly than pretend otherwise, because a family who chooses online for a case that needs presence will waste a term.

Young children. A PYP student, and often a child in the first years of the MYP, is not yet able to hold attention to a screen for an hour with an adult they do not know. Physical presence does work that video does not: it manages attention, catches the moment the child drifts, and makes the session feel like something happening rather than something being watched. If your child is eight, the honest answer is that in-home, or an online session with a parent sitting alongside, is more likely to work than online alone.

Students who cannot start. Some students do not have a knowledge problem; they have an initiation problem. They know what to do and cannot begin. A person in the room solves this in a way a video call does not, because leaving a video call is easy and leaving a room with a tutor in it is not.

Equipment-dependent practical work. Some practical skills — handling glassware, setting up apparatus, drawing to scale with instruments — benefit from someone physically adjusting what the student is doing. The IB Internal Assessment in the sciences is mostly design, data and evaluation, which is screen work, but the practical technique behind it is not.

Households where the quiet room does not exist. Online tutoring assumes a door that closes. In a busy apartment with younger siblings and no spare room, that assumption can simply be false, and a tutor at the dining table with everyone else told to be quiet is a more realistic intervention than a video call from a corner of the living room.

None of those four is about content, which is the point. They are about the conditions teaching needs before content can land, and no hourly rate fixes them.

If any of those describe your situation, the Dubai in-home market exists, the rate band is roughly AED 180-500 an hour with travel inside the fee, and the vetting questions in our guide to how to choose an IB tutor in Dubai apply in full — particularly the one about the MoHRE private tuition work permit, which applies to in-home and online tutors alike.

What a small group changes, and what it does not

Group tutoring is usually sold on price and chosen on price, which is reasonable, but it changes the product more than parents expect.

What a group genuinely does better: content coverage, pace and motivation. Three students sitting the same paper, taught the same topic, with the tutor working examples on a shared board, is an efficient way to cover a syllabus. Students also ask questions in a group that they will not ask one to one, because another student has already asked something and the ice is broken.

What a group cannot do: diagnose. The whole value of one-to-one tutoring is that the hour is spent on the specific thing this specific student gets wrong. In a group of four, the tutor is teaching to the median problem, and your child's particular error pattern gets a share of attention proportional to nothing in particular. For Internal Assessment work, Extended Essay supervision and Theory of Knowledge, a group is close to useless, because each student's work is different by design.

The practical compromise many Dubai families land on is a group for content and a short one-to-one block for the individual work. That can work well. What does not work is a group bought as a cheaper substitute for diagnosis, discovered in week eight to have covered the syllabus without touching the reason the student is losing marks.

Note that two of the six point away from online. The mode is a function of the problem, and the honest version of this article has to say so. Our IB Internal Assessment tutoring page for Dubai and the IB retake tutoring page for Dubai cover the fourth and sixth rows specifically.

Our one-to-one IB tutoring page for Dubai and the IB and IGCSE combined online tutoring page describe how these cases are handled; both are online delivery for UAE families.

Cost per learning minute: three worked examples in AED

This is the comparison that actually answers the question, and it needs you to accept one idea: what you are buying is teaching minutes, and the right denominator is teaching minutes delivered over a term, not the headline hourly rate.

All three examples below use stated assumptions and a twelve-week term. They are arithmetic, not data.

Assumptions: cancellations and lateness are illustrative, not measured; AED 300 and AED 220 are chosen from the published market bands above; "AED per teaching hour delivered" divides total spend by minutes actually taught. The in-home total is charged for ten sessions because two were cancelled and not billed, and the lateness is absorbed as lost teaching, which is the usual real-world outcome.

A quarter of the term's teaching never happens, and it is the travel that both prices the hour and eats it.

So the delivered gap is AED 113 an hour where the quoted gap was AED 80. Our online IB tuition page for Dubai sets out how sessions are scheduled so that the delivered number stays equal to the quoted one.

Two things fall out of this. First, the gap between modes is wider than the gap between the rates, because the in-home model loses teaching minutes to the same travel that makes it expensive. Second — and this matters more — the online model's advantage is largely about reliability and granularity: no travel means fewer lost sessions and the ability to buy thirty minutes when thirty minutes is what the problem needs.

The counter-case is real and worth stating. If your child does ten minutes of useful work in an online hour and fifty in an in-home hour, every number above inverts and in-home is dramatically cheaper per learning minute. That is why the section above on where a tutor in the room still wins exists. The arithmetic does not decide; it tells you what to weigh.

What you need at home for online lessons not to be annoying

Most complaints about online tutoring are complaints about a setup, and the setup is fixable in an afternoon. Four things matter and the rest does not.

A door that closes. This is the one that actually predicts whether online works. Not a desk, not a dedicated study — a room where the door shuts and nobody walks through for an hour. A bedroom works. A corner of the majlis with a television on does not.

A laptop or desktop, not a phone. A phone cannot show a past paper and the tutor at the same time, and a student squinting at a question on a six-inch screen is not doing timed practice. A tablet with a keyboard is acceptable; a tablet propped against a cushion is not.

A way to get written work onto the screen. For maths and the sciences this is the difference between a good session and a frustrating one. The cheapest version is a phone photograph of the student's working, sent at the start. Better is an inexpensive graphics tablet, which lets the student write while the tutor watches the working appear — and watching the working appear is how a tutor spots a method error rather than guessing at it from a wrong answer.

That is the whole case for the cheapest piece of equipment on this list. A wrong final answer tells a tutor almost nothing; the line where the method went wrong tells them everything, and on paper that line is invisible until the session is over.

Headphones with a microphone. Laptop speakers plus laptop microphone produce echo, which makes both people talk over each other, which makes an hour exhausting. A cheap pair of wired earphones solves it.

What does not matter: an expensive camera, a second monitor, a particular video platform, or a fast gaming machine. Broadband in Dubai is generally not the limiting factor; the limiting factor is almost always the door.

Scheduling against the Dubai week, Ramadan and the exam calendar

A tutoring plan that ignores the UAE calendar will be rebuilt three times a year. Three features of the Dubai year do most of the damage.

The school week and the weekend. Most Dubai private schools run a Monday-to-Friday week with a Saturday-Sunday weekend, and Friday afternoons are shaped by prayers and family time. In practice this concentrates weekday tutoring demand into the late afternoon and early evening, Monday to Thursday, which is also precisely the window in which crossing the city by car is slowest. Online scheduling is less constrained by this because only the tutor's and student's time has to align, not a route. Weekend mornings are the most under-used good slot in Dubai tutoring, and for in-home they are the slot where the travel problem largely disappears — see weekend IB tutoring in Dubai and evening IB tutoring in Dubai for how each pattern is usually arranged.

Ramadan. School hours shorten, energy patterns change, and the useful study window moves later in the day for fasting students. A plan built on a late-afternoon session will often need to become a post-iftar session, and it is better to agree that in advance than to renegotiate it in week one of the month. Online delivery makes the shift trivial; in-home makes it a travel problem at a new time of day. We have written the month out session by session in our Ramadan study schedule for IB students, which is worth agreeing with a tutor before the month rather than during it.

The exam calendar, which is the one families get wrong. Cambridge International runs IGCSE, O Level and International A Level exams in a June series and a November series, with Primary and Lower Secondary Checkpoint tests in March, May and October. The February/March series is offered to India only — if you see a UAE tutoring page quoting a February or March exam window, it has been copied from an Indian page and you should distrust everything else on it. Pearson Edexcel International GCSE runs in May/June and November.

Cambridge also allocates every exam centre to one of six administrative zones, and states that it is essential to use the correct version of the timetable for your zone, because it cannot accept responsibility for candidates who miss an exam after using the wrong one. That is a sentence worth reading twice: the timetable your child revises against must be the one for their centre's zone, taken from the school's exams officer.

For checkable anchors on how results timing works: Pearson's November 2026 final International GCSE timetable ran from late October to 19 November 2026; June 2026 results reached centres on 19 August 2026 and students on 20 August 2026; and November 2025 results reached students on 22 January 2026. Those dates are backward-looking citations, which is why they carry years. For any upcoming series, take the dates from the board's live timetable. For IB session dates specifically, confirm with your school's IB coordinator or ibo.org — not from a tutoring site, including this one.

Lit months are where tutoring demand concentrates and where availability disappears, which is the scheduling argument for booking against this strip rather than against a feeling. Our articles on the IB exam timetable for UAE candidates and the IGCSE exam timetable for UAE candidates work through each window.

Holiday periods are the other scheduling lever and the most under-used. A gap closed over the summer is a gap that does not have to be closed in October alongside new content, which is why IB holiday tuition in Dubai and IGCSE summer tuition in Dubai exist as distinct plans rather than as term-time sessions moved sideways.

The hybrid plan, and why most hybrids quietly become one mode

The obvious answer to this article is "do both" — an in-home session for the main weekly slot and online for the extras. On paper it is the best of both. In practice, most hybrids drift into one mode within a term, and it is worth knowing why before you design one.

They drift because the two modes have different friction. The online session is easy to add, easy to move and easy to shorten. The in-home session is hard to add, hard to move and never shortened, because the travel has already been spent. So whenever the plan has to flex — and it always has to flex, around a test, a trip, an illness, a school event — the flexing happens on the online side. After two months, the online side is carrying most of the sessions and the in-home slot has become a fortnightly habit nobody has reviewed.

A hybrid that survives usually has three features. The modes are assigned to different jobs, not to the same job on different days: in-home for the thing that needs presence, online for papers and follow-ups. The in-home slot is at a time when travel is not a problem, which in Dubai usually means a weekend morning. And there is one tutor, or two tutors who actually talk to each other — two unconnected tutors teaching the same subject is not a hybrid, it is two plans competing for the same student's week.

The failure mode is always the same and always invisible: because the online session is the easy one to move, every flex lands there, and after two months the in-home slot is a fortnightly habit nobody has reviewed.

If you want a hybrid and we cannot supply the in-home half, say so and we will tell you plainly rather than selling you an online plan as a substitute. The IB home tutoring page for Dubai and the IB home tuition page exist because that is what parents search for, and both say what we actually deliver in the UAE.

How IB Gram delivers in the UAE, and what we do not do

To restate it without marketing language, because this is the part that must not be ambiguous.

We teach UAE families online, one to one, over live video, scheduled against Gulf Standard Time and the Dubai school week. We do not send a tutor to any address in the UAE. Our in-home service is India-only. We will not accept a booking for a tutor at a UAE address, and if that is what you need, we would rather tell you now than in week two.

We hold no KHDA, ADEK, SPEA, Ministry of Education, MoHRE, IB, Cambridge or Pearson approval, accreditation or partnership, and we do not describe ourselves as approved by any of them. KHDA's Educational Services Permit is a specific licence issued to training institutes with premises; we do not hold it and nobody should imply they do without a permit number. On the individual side, private tutoring in the UAE requires a MoHRE private tutor work permit under Ministerial Resolution No. 710 of 2023, granted free of charge for two years through MoHRE's own e-services — a question worth asking any tutor you engage, whichever mode you choose. The regulatory picture is set out in full in our piece on KHDA rules for private tutors in Dubai.

We do not guarantee grades, we do not publish statistics we cannot evidence, and we do not write assessed coursework. Internal Assessment, Extended Essay and Theory of Knowledge support is teaching, feedback and process coaching, never drafting — IB's academic-honesty rules make the alternative a malpractice risk carried by your child, not by us.

And availability is genuinely subject to availability. A Higher Level specialist in a niche subject at five on a Monday afternoon is not something anyone can promise without checking, and where no UAE-based tutor covers a combination, we say where the alternative tutor is based rather than hiding it behind a local-looking page.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is in-home or online IB tutoring cheaper in Dubai?

Online is cheaper on both the headline rate and the delivered cost. Market rates in Dubai run roughly AED 150-300 an hour for a qualified online subject tutor against AED 180-500 for an in-home one-to-one visit, where the tutor's travel is priced into the fee. The delivered gap is wider than the rate gap, because the in-home model also loses teaching minutes to lateness and travel-related cancellations. The exception is a student who works far more productively with someone physically present — then in-home can be cheaper per minute of actual learning despite costing more per hour.

How long should an online IB tutoring session be?

Sixty minutes suits most Middle Years Programme and Standard Level Diploma work. Ninety minutes suits Higher Level subjects and timed-paper practice, where you need a full paper plus a review of it. Forty-five minutes is right for primary-age children, whose attention on screen runs out before an hour does. The thing online makes possible and in-home does not is the thirty-minute session: one specific fix before a test. Nobody drives across Dubai for half an hour, so that length only exists in the online model, and in an exam term it is often the most useful purchase available.

Should I ask for online lessons to be recorded?

Yes, and treat a refusal as information. A recording of the session in which the method marks on a mechanics question were finally explained properly is worth more in revision week than any set of notes, because the student can rewatch the explanation at the speed they need. Ask where recordings are stored, how long they are kept, and who can access them, since the material involves a child. In-home tutoring structurally cannot offer this, which is one of the few advantages of the online model that has no in-home equivalent at all.

What equipment does my child need for online IB tutoring?

Four things, and none of them are expensive: a room with a door that closes, a laptop or desktop rather than a phone, wired earphones with a microphone to stop echo, and a way to get handwritten working onto the screen — a phone photograph at minimum, an inexpensive graphics tablet if the subject is maths or a science. The graphics tablet matters more than parents expect, because watching the working appear live is how a tutor spots a method error instead of inferring it from a wrong final answer. An expensive camera and a second monitor change nothing.

Can an online tutor help with a science Internal Assessment that involves practical work?

With most of it, yes. The marks in a science Internal Assessment sit largely in the design of the investigation, the handling and processing of data, the analysis and the evaluation — all of which are screen work and all of which an online tutor can coach against the published criteria. What an online tutor cannot do is stand next to your child adjusting apparatus, and the practical session itself normally happens at school with the school's equipment anyway. The boundary to hold in both modes: a tutor coaches the process and gives feedback; a tutor never writes or rewrites the report.

Will a teenager actually concentrate in an online lesson?

Usually yes, if the session is one to one and the setup is right, because a one-to-one video lesson gives a student nowhere to hide — they are being asked questions continuously and the tutor can see when they stop writing. Concentration failures in online tutoring almost always trace to one of three things: a group session where the student can go quiet, a phone screen too small to work on, or a room people walk through. Fix those before concluding the mode does not suit your child. If the student genuinely cannot begin work without a person present, that is a different problem and in-home is the answer.

Does small-group tutoring work for the IB Diploma?

For content coverage, yes — three or four students sitting the same paper at the same level can be taught a topic efficiently, and students often ask questions in a group that they would not ask alone. For anything individual, no. Internal Assessment, Extended Essay and Theory of Knowledge work is different for every student by design, so a group cannot coach it. The failure mode we see most is a group bought as a cheaper substitute for diagnosis: the syllabus gets covered, and the specific reason this student loses marks is never addressed.

How much does Dubai traffic really affect an in-home tutoring plan?

Enough to change which tutors you can hire. Weekday tutoring demand in Dubai concentrates into the late afternoon and early evening, Monday to Thursday, which is also when crossing the city is slowest, so in-home tutors cluster their students geographically to make the evening work. If your community is outside a tutor's cluster you compete for awkward slots, lateness becomes structural rather than occasional, and capacity tightens exactly when exam term arrives. The practical workaround is a weekend morning slot, when the travel constraint largely disappears and good tutors are frequently free.

What happens to tutoring during Ramadan?

The useful study window moves later in the day, school hours shorten, and a plan built around a late-afternoon session usually needs to become a post-iftar session. Agree that shift before the month starts rather than renegotiating it in the first week. Keep the frequency and shorten the sessions rather than the reverse — consistency matters more than length, and a tired student in a ninety-minute session learns less than an alert one in forty-five minutes. Online delivery makes the time change trivial; an in-home plan has to re-solve the travel problem at a new hour.

Should a primary-age PYP child be tutored online?

Online can work for a Primary Years Programme child, but only with an adult nearby and shorter sessions of around forty-five minutes. A young child's attention to a screen with an adult they do not yet know runs out before an hour does, and physical presence does real work that video does not: it notices the exact moment the child drifts and redirects without breaking the session. If no adult can sit nearby, in-home is the more realistic choice at that age. By the Middle Years Programme the calculation changes, and by the Diploma it reverses for most students.

How do I stop paying for a tutor who is always late?

Deal with it as a term, not a conversation. Agree in writing at the start that the session ends at the scheduled time regardless of when it starts, and that the fee is pro-rated when the tutor arrives late. That single clause converts lateness from your problem into the tutor's, and a professional will accept it without argument. If lateness is structural rather than occasional — three or four times a term — the cause is usually travel inside the model rather than carelessness, and the fix is either a weekend morning slot or a switch to online delivery.

Can we switch from in-home to online part-way through the year?

Yes, and mid-year is often the natural moment, because exam term is when travel-driven cancellations hurt most and when short targeted sessions become valuable. Two things make the switch work: move the same tutor if you can, so continuity of diagnosis is not lost, and set the home setup up properly before the first online session rather than discovering the echo and the phone screen live. Expect the first online session to be slightly worse than the last in-home one, and judge the mode on the third, not the first.

Is a tuition centre in Dubai better than a private tutor?

A centre buys structure: a timetable, premises, a fixed plan and a routine your child cannot drift out of, which suits some students more than any amount of flexibility. What it costs you is the driving — twice per session, on the centre's timetable, not yours — and the individual diagnosis, because centre teaching is usually class-based. A centre is also a different legal entity from an individual tutor: an organisation with premises and staff in Dubai needs a KHDA Educational Services Permit for a training institute, which you are entitled to ask to see.