How to Choose an IB Tutor in Dubai: A Parent's Vetting Guide

Choosing an IB tutor in Dubai is not really a search problem. Within ten minutes of typing "IB tutor Dubai" into Google you will have twenty names, a dozen WhatsApp numbers and at least three websites promising a grade. So how to choose an IB tutor in Dubai is a vetting problem, not a finding problem. The hard part is working out which of those names can actually teach the specific thing your child is stuck on, is legally permitted to tutor in the UAE, and will still be turning up in week fourteen when the Internal Assessment deadline lands.

This guide is written for parents of International Baccalaureate (IB) students in Dubai — the Primary Years Programme (PYP), the Middle Years Programme (MYP) and above all the Diploma Programme (DP), where the pressure is concentrated. It is a vetting guide rather than a sales page. It tells you what to ask, what a good answer sounds like, what the Dubai market charges and why, which claims on a tutoring website should make you close the tab, and where a tutor's role stops under IB's own academic-honesty rules.

One disclosure before anything else, because it changes how you should read the section on delivery. IB Gram teaches UAE families online, one to one, over live video. We do not send a tutor to a villa in Arabian Ranches or an apartment in Dubai Marina; our in-home service exists only in India. That means this guide discusses the in-home market honestly, as a thing you may well choose, without pretending we supply it.

Seven per cent sounds small until you multiply it out: that is roughly twenty-seven thousand children in Dubai sitting inside an IB programme, spread across schools running the PYP, the MYP, the DP and the Career-related Programme. KHDA has also confirmed that Dubai's 2026-27 intake adds seven new private schools — four UK curriculum and three International Baccalaureate — creating 16,846 new places, after six new schools opened during 2025-26 and enrolment rose 6%. The IB population in Dubai is growing, which is why the tutoring market around it has grown faster than the quality control in it.

Seven per cent of a market that size is roughly twenty-seven thousand children, which is why a Dubai tutor can advertise IB expertise without ever having read a subject guide, and still have plenty of enquiries.

What does "a good IB tutor" actually mean for a Dubai family?

A good IB tutor is someone who knows the assessment your child is being measured against, can diagnose which part of it is failing, and can change their teaching when the first approach does not work. Everything else — university pedigree, years of experience, how impressive the website looks — is a proxy, and in Dubai it is an unusually unreliable one.

The reason is structural. The IB Diploma is not a syllabus you can teach from general subject knowledge. A brilliant university physicist who has never read the DP Physics guide will not know that the Internal Assessment is marked against published criteria, that personal engagement is where students most often lose marks they could have kept, or that a well-designed investigation and a well-written one are credited differently. A tutor who has taught the programme knows those things as reflexes. A tutor who has not will teach your child physics, which is a fine thing to be taught and not the thing being assessed.

So the first filter is not "is this person good at the subject?" It is "has this person worked inside this assessment?" The second filter is subject-and-level precision, which matters more in the DP than in almost any other school system because of how the courses split. Several of our most-visited pages exist purely because parents search at that level of precision: an IB DP Maths AA HL tutor in Dubai and an IB DP Maths AI SL tutor in Dubai are teaching two genuinely different courses with different papers, different technology expectations and different university consequences. Asking for "a maths tutor" in the DP is like asking a doctor for "some medicine". The other two routes have their own pages for the same reason: IB DP Maths AA SL tutoring in Dubai and IB DP Maths AI HL tutoring in Dubai. Four courses, four sets of papers, one search term.

The third filter — and the one almost no parent applies — is whether the person is legally permitted to tutor in the UAE at all. That has a definite answer, and it is checkable. We come to it in a moment.

That last row is not a joke. A guaranteed grade is a claim nobody can honour, because the tutor does not sit the paper, does not mark it and does not set the boundaries. When you see it, you have learned something real about how the provider treats parents.

How to choose an IB tutor in Dubai: start with the subject and level, not the CV

Write down four things before you speak to anybody: the programme, the subject, the level, and the specific failure. "DP1, Chemistry HL, lost most of the marks on the organic chemistry paper, and has not started planning the IA" is a brief a competent tutor can quote against in one conversation. "She's struggling with science" is not.

The level matters because of what sits inside it. A Higher Level DP subject carries more content, more teaching hours, an extra paper in most groups, and a heavier weighting on the parts students find hardest. Moving a student from a 4 to a 5 at Standard Level and from a 5 to a 6 at Higher Level are different jobs needing different numbers of hours, and a tutor who quotes the same plan for both has not read your brief.

The jump worth noticing is the last one. A Higher Level subject in an exam year starts at roughly three times the weekly time a PYP child needs, which is why a provider quoting one pattern for every case has not read your brief. The IB PYP tutoring page for Dubai and the IB DP Biology HL tutoring page for Dubai are built around those two very different jobs.

A tutor should be willing to argue with that table for your child. If they accept it without a question, they are reading it back to you rather than thinking about the case. The useful conversation sounds like: "Two sessions a week for Chemistry HL is right for the first month while we clear organic, then I'd drop to one and use the second slot for IA planning before the school's internal deadline."

For families who want to see how this plays out subject by subject, the level-specific pages are the quickest orientation: IB DP Chemistry HL tutoring in Dubai, IB DP Physics HL tutoring in Dubai, IB DP Economics HL tutoring in Dubai and the IB MYP tutoring page for Dubai each set out the assessment structure rather than listing adjectives.

How to check a private tutor is legally permitted to teach in the UAE

This is the fastest filter available to you and the one least used. Private tutoring in the UAE is regulated by permit. The private tutor work permit was introduced by Ministerial Resolution No. 710 of 2023 Regarding the Introduction of Private Tuition Work Permits, and it is issued by the Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation (MoHRE), not by KHDA.

Two facts make this easy to raise without awkwardness. First, the permit is granted free of charge for two years. There is no cost argument against holding one. Second, MoHRE's own service page — "Issuance of a New Work Permit - Private Tutor Licensing" — lists a two-working-day completion time through the MoHRE smart app, website and e-services system. A tutor who tells you the permit is expensive, slow or optional is telling you they have not looked.

Nothing in that panel is onerous, which is the point of raising it: there is no cost, delay or paperwork argument against a tutor holding the permit, so an excuse is information. The full regulatory picture, including who needs which permit, is in the UAE private tutor work permit explained.

The eligible categories are broad, which is the point: the permit is designed to bring ordinary tutoring inside the law rather than to exclude people.

Source for the eligibility rows: the u.ae work permits page and MoHRE's private tutor licensing service page, read in October 2026.

The two columns are different legal animals, and most of the misleading language in this market comes from treating them as one. IB Gram holds neither permit type and does not describe itself as approved by anyone.

The last two rows are where most confusion lives. A tutoring business running a centre in Dubai with premises and staff is a different legal animal from an individual tutor: it needs a KHDA Educational Services Permit for a training institute, which runs through initial approval, a maximum of six months to complete the permit and licence steps, and annual renewal requested at least 30 days before expiry. That is the permit people are implicitly claiming when they advertise "KHDA approved". IB Gram does not hold a KHDA Educational Services Permit, does not hold ADEK, SPEA, Ministry of Education, Cambridge or Pearson approval, and does not describe itself as approved by any of them. If a provider's website uses that phrase, ask to see the permit number. The regulatory detail is unpacked properly in our companion piece on KHDA rules for private tutors in Dubai.

One more boundary worth knowing before you ask a teacher at your child's school for private lessons. Abu Dhabi's professional-ethics rules for private and charter school staff prohibit teachers from giving paid private tutoring to students enrolled at their own school, and the MoHRE permit's code of conduct also bars serving students affiliated with the tutor's own school. That is press-reported rather than quoted from the policy document, so verify it against the current ADEK text if you are in Abu Dhabi — but treat "your child's own teacher, privately" as a conversation to avoid rather than a shortcut to arrange.

Finally: if a UAE page routes you to a foreign mobile number as its only contact, you are not dealing with a UAE-delivered service, whatever the page says. That is worth knowing — plenty of excellent teaching happens remotely, including ours — but it should be disclosed to you rather than discovered by you.

What the Dubai market charges, and what the price is actually buying

Most Dubai tutoring sites do not publish a price. Of the pages we examined in this market, three of six published no figure at all, and the two that did quoted US dollars — a currency no Dubai family pays a tutor in. So here is the market in dirhams, attributed.

Those are market rates, not IB Gram's rates. Monthly packages visible in the Dubai market run around AED 799 a month for eight online sessions and AED 1,599-1,799 a month for four two-hour in-home sessions. Bestimate's own monthly estimates for a weekly one-hour session land at AED 240-600 for budget tutoring, AED 600-1,200 for mid-tier and AED 1,000-2,000+ for specialist exam-year support.

The useful question is not "is this expensive?" but "what is inside the hour?" Three costs hide inside a quoted rate and only one of them is teaching.

The first is travel. An in-home rate of AED 300 for a tutor who spends fifty minutes in Dubai traffic each way is not AED 300 of teaching; it is AED 300 for a package in which teaching is a minority of the tutor's committed time, and you are paying for the rest whether anyone names it or not. That arithmetic is worked through properly in our piece on home versus online IB tutoring in Dubai.

Teaching is a minority of the block. That is not a scandal, it is what travel costs, and the only mistake is paying for it without knowing you are.

The second is preparation. A tutor who reads your child's marked Paper 2 before the session, builds a question set from the errors in it and sends a summary afterwards is doing perhaps forty minutes of unbilled work around each hour. A tutor who arrives and asks "so what are we doing today?" is not. Both can quote AED 250.

The third is replacement risk. If your tutor leaves Dubai in March of the DP2 year — and people do leave Dubai in March — what happens? An individual freelancer at AED 200 has no answer. That gap is a real cost, paid later. If fees are the main question for you, the dedicated pages on IB home tutor fees in Dubai and IB tutor cost in Dubai go through the bands in more detail, and our guide to IB home tutor fees in Dubai takes apart the monthly-package maths.

It is worth setting tutoring against the larger number on your statement. KHDA confirmed on 22 May 2026 that there would be no increase in school fees for private schools in Dubai for the 2026-27 academic year, under Dubai's second economic incentives package valued at AED 1.5 billion. School fees are, for one year, a fixed quantity. Tutoring is the variable you control, which is a reason to buy it deliberately rather than reactively in April. If you are weighing the top of that table, read what the premium is actually meant to buy on our IB examiner-experienced tutor page for Dubai and the experienced IB tutor page for Dubai, both of which say what cannot be evidenced as well as what can. The parallel bands for the British track are in IGCSE tutor fees in Dubai.

The questions that separate a subject teacher from an IB specialist

Here is the part you can use tonight. These are the questions whose answers cannot be improvised, with what a strong answer sounds like and what a weak one sounds like.

Every answer in the left column is specific and every answer in the right column would fit any subject, any child and any curriculum. That is the whole test.

The last row is the single most important question in the list, and we give it its own section below because getting it wrong can end a child's Diploma.

Two smaller tells, both reliable. Ask what the tutor would do if your child's school teacher disagrees with their method; a specialist answers "we go with the school, because the school marks the IA". And ask what they would not teach. A tutor who claims every subject at every level across two or three curricula is describing an agency's capacity, not a person's.

How to run a trial lesson so that it tells you something

Most trial lessons are wasted because they are auditions, and everyone performs. A trial is only diagnostic if you set it up to be. Three rules do most of the work.

Send material in advance. Give the tutor your child's most recent marked assessment — the actual paper with the marks on it — forty-eight hours before. What they do with it is the test. The right move is to arrive having found the pattern in the errors and to open the session with it.

Do not sit in, but do ask for a written follow-up. Sitting in changes your child's behaviour and tells you less than you think. A written summary, however, is hard to fake: it should name what was covered, what the specific weakness is, what the plan is for the next four sessions, and one thing your child should do before the next lesson.

Ask your child one question afterwards, and only one. Not "did you like him?" — children are polite and tutors are likeable. Ask: "What do you understand now that you didn't at four o'clock?" If there is no answer, the session was pleasant and did not teach anything.

Only the first row needs preparation from you, and it is the one that decides the rest. If past-paper work is what you want the sessions built on, our IB past papers practice page for Dubai and the IB mock exam preparation page for Dubai describe what that looks like week to week.

Charging for a trial is not itself a warning sign, by the way, and "free" is only meaningful if the conditions are stated on the same screen: how long, who is eligible, whether a card is needed. A provider that says "free trial" and then asks for a month upfront has told you something.

What an IB tutor may and may not do with an IA, EE or TOK essay

This is where a bad choice stops being expensive and becomes dangerous. The Internal Assessment, the Extended Essay and the Theory of Knowledge essay must be the student's own work. IB's academic-honesty rules treat breaches as malpractice, with consequences that can reach the award of the Diploma itself. The student carries that risk, not the tutor.

So the boundary needs to be explicit, in writing, before the first session.

A tutor may: explain the published assessment criteria; teach the subject content the student needs; help narrow a research question by asking questions until the student narrows it; teach how to structure an argument, present data, or evaluate a method; read a draft and give feedback that names weaknesses without supplying the fix; teach referencing properly; and practise the oral or presentation components.

A tutor may not: write or part-write any section; rewrite a paragraph into better English; supply the research question; supply the data; "tidy up" a conclusion; or edit a draft to a finished state. The test is simple and worth remembering: after the session, is the next version of the document still traceable to the student's own thinking and the student's own sentences? If a tutor has typed into the document, the answer is no.

One test covers all six rows: after the session, is the next version still traceable to the student's own thinking and the student's own sentences? If the tutor has typed into the document, the answer is no, and the student is the one who carries the malpractice risk.

We say this plainly because the market needs it said. One site ranking for these searches sells completed Internal Assessments outright, at a published price. That is not tutoring; it is a malpractice trigger with an invoice attached, and the student is the one who pays for it. We will also never offer to supply IB, Cambridge or Pearson syllabus documents, past papers, mark schemes or grade-boundary tables as downloads — those belong to the boards, and your child's school or the board's own site is where they come from. Our IB Extended Essay tutoring page for Dubai, TOK tutoring page and Internal Assessment support page all describe the work as coaching and feedback, because that is the only form it can legitimately take.

Red flags on Dubai tutoring websites, and what each one actually tells you

We read sixty-odd pages ranking for Dubai IB and IGCSE tutoring queries in October 2026. The patterns below came out of that reading. None of these is a matter of taste.

• A star rating with no reviews behind it. We found pages showing two different ratings and review counts in the same document, and one showing a rating from twenty reviews next to a claim of thousands of students. A self-asserted rating in structured data is against Google's own policy and, as a commercial representation in the UAE, is a consumer-protection exposure. If you cannot click through to dated, attributable reviews, treat the number as decoration.
• A statistic with no sample size, date or method. A bare satisfaction percentage or a claimed median tutor score is the house style of this market. Ask how many students, measured when, and how. The absence of an answer is the answer.
• "KHDA-approved tutors". As set out above, KHDA's Educational Services Permit is issued to training institutes with premises. Anyone using that phrase about individual tutors should be able to produce a permit number.
• A guaranteed grade, or a refund promise with no published terms. A guarantee without the exact terms on the same page is a marketing sentence, not an obligation.
• Prices in dollars or pounds on a UAE page. It usually means the page was written for another market and has had "Dubai" dropped into it.
• A foreign mobile number as the only contact. Remote delivery is legitimate. Undisclosed remote delivery dressed as a local service is not.
• "Coursework help", "IA writing service", "done-for-you". Close the tab. See the section above.
• No exam session named anywhere. A provider that never mentions a June or November series is not working to your child's calendar. And if you see a UAE page quoting a February or March Cambridge exam window, it has copied an Indian page: Cambridge's February/March series is offered to India only. UAE candidates sit the June and November series.

Nothing in that panel is about taste. A page that will not name a currency its reader pays in, and will not name the free permit its tutors need, is telling you who it was written for.

That last point deserves a note, because it is the kind of error that costs a family real money. Cambridge 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 — it cannot accept responsibility for candidates who miss an exam after using the wrong one. Pearson Edexcel International GCSE runs in May/June and November: the November 2026 final 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 are backward-looking citations, which is why they carry dates. For any upcoming series, take the dates from the board's live timetable and your school's exams officer, never from a tutoring website. IB session dates in particular should be confirmed with your school's IB coordinator or ibo.org rather than taken from any third party, including us.

Two lit windows, not three. That single check tells you whether the page in front of you was written for your child's country, and our articles on the IB exam timetable for UAE candidates and IB results day in the UAE work to those windows rather than to a copied calendar.

How IB Gram delivers lessons to families in Dubai

Plainly: online, one to one, over live video, with a UAE-appropriate schedule. We do not send tutors to homes in the UAE. In-home tutoring is a service we run in India only, and we would rather lose an enquiry than take a booking we cannot keep.

What that means for a Dubai family is worth stating concretely rather than as a benefit list. Lessons are scheduled against Gulf Standard Time and the Dubai school week, with slots that work after a school run from Jumeirah, Mirdif or Dubai Hills Estate rather than slots that assume a tutor is already in your building. Because there is no travel in the model, a session can be sixty minutes at seven in the evening on a Tuesday without anybody budgeting for Sheikh Zayed Road at six. And if a specialist for a niche subject and level is not available in the UAE, we say so and offer the alternative explicitly, including where the tutor is based — we do not conceal non-UAE delivery behind a local-looking page.

Availability is always subject to tutor availability, which is a boring sentence that we mean literally: nobody can promise a DP Physics HL specialist at five in the afternoon on Mondays without checking. The pages that set out delivery for each case are IB online tutoring in Dubai, one-to-one IB tutoring in Dubai and, for the DP specifically, IB DP tutoring in Dubai. Families outside Dubai can start from IB tutoring in Abu Dhabi or IB tutoring in Sharjah; the emirate matters because the regulator does.

Reviewing the plan after six weeks: the three things to look at

Set the review date when you book the first session, not when you start worrying. Six weeks is long enough for a competent tutor to show movement and short enough that a bad match has not consumed a term.

Look at three things, in this order.

A mark under timed conditions. Not "she seems more confident" — a score on a past paper or school assessment done to time. If the tutor has not produced one in six weeks, that itself is the finding. The number does not need to have risen dramatically; it needs to exist, and the tutor needs to be able to explain what is inside it.

The reason the number does not need to jump is that grade bands are wide and the distance across one is usually a handful of raw marks spread over several papers. A score that exists, and that the tutor can explain the inside of, is the finding. A score that does not exist after six weeks is also the finding.

The error pattern, and whether it has changed. Good tutoring changes the kind of mistake a student makes. Content errors become method errors, method errors become timing errors, timing errors become careless errors, and careless errors are the last thing to go. A student making the same category of mistake in week six as in week one has not been taught differently, only more.

Progress is a move rightward along that row, not a bigger number. If you can name which box your child is in now and which one they were in six weeks ago, you have your answer about the tutoring. The IB revision classes page for Dubai and the IB exam preparation page for Dubai are both organised around the last two boxes rather than the first.

Your child's description of the sessions. By week six a student working with a good tutor can tell you what they are working on and why. "We're doing past papers" is a holding answer. "We're fixing how I set out the method marks, because that's where I was losing them" is the sound of teaching having landed.

If two of the three are weak, change something — the frequency, the focus, or the tutor. Changing the tutor in week six is annoying. Changing in week twenty, with the exam session approaching, is a different order of problem. If you have not started yet, the companion pieces on the best time to start IB tutoring in Dubai and the best IB schools in Dubai cover the two decisions that sit upstream of choosing a tutor at all.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does an IB tutor in Dubai cost per hour?

Market rates for IB tutoring in Dubai run roughly AED 45-150 an hour for budget or university-student online tutoring, AED 150-300 for a qualified subject tutor online, AED 180-500 for an in-home one-to-one visit where travel is inside the fee, and AED 200-450+ for an IB, IGCSE or A-Level specialist. One Dubai provider publishes AED 650 an hour for premium examiner-led teaching. These bands 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 price list.

Does an IB tutor in Dubai need a licence or permit?

Yes. An individual providing private tuition in the UAE needs a private tutor work permit from the Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation, introduced by Ministerial Resolution No. 710 of 2023. The permit is granted free of charge for two years, and MoHRE's service page lists a two-working-day completion time via its smart app, website and e-services system. Working without one exposes the tutor to fines and penalties under the applicable laws; no fine schedule is published, so no amount should be quoted to you. Ask the question directly — a tutor with nothing to hide answers it in one word.

Is "KHDA-approved tutor" a real thing?

Not in the way most Dubai websites use it. KHDA oversees the quality of private education in Dubai and issues an Educational Services Permit to training institutes — organisations with premises and staff — through initial approval, up to six months to complete the permit and licence steps, and annual renewal requested at least 30 days before expiry. Individual private tutors are permitted by MoHRE, not approved by KHDA. If a provider advertises KHDA-approved tutors, ask for the permit number. IB Gram does not hold a KHDA permit and does not describe itself as KHDA approved.

What should I ask in a first conversation with an IB tutor?

Six questions do most of the filtering: which IB subjects and levels have you taught by name; how is the Internal Assessment in this subject marked; what will you do in the first session; do you hold the MoHRE private tutoring permit; what happens if you are unavailable during exam term; and will you help write the Extended Essay. The last one must be answered "no, I will coach the process and give feedback". Anyone who agrees to write assessed coursework is exposing your child to an IB malpractice finding, not helping them.

How many tutoring sessions a week does an IB Diploma student need?

It depends on the level and the gap, not on a general rule. A Standard Level subject with a content gap usually starts at one 60-90 minute session a week; a Higher Level subject in an exam year commonly needs two, at least for the first month, because of the extra paper and the HL-only material. Internal Assessment, Extended Essay and Theory of Knowledge support works better as short intensive blocks around the school's internal deadlines than as a weekly slot. A tutor who quotes the same pattern for every case has not read your brief.

Does IB Gram send tutors to homes in Dubai?

No. IB Gram teaches UAE families online, one to one, over live video. Our in-home tutoring service operates in India only, and we will not take a booking for a tutor at a UAE address. We say this on every UAE page because the alternative — accepting the enquiry and sorting it out later — is how families end up with no tutor in week two. If physical presence in the room is essential for your child, the Dubai in-home market exists and the rate band is roughly AED 180-500 an hour with travel inside the fee.

Can my child's school teacher tutor them privately?

Treat this as something to avoid. Abu Dhabi's professional-ethics rules for private and charter school staff prohibit teachers from providing paid private tutoring to students enrolled at their own school, and the MoHRE private tuition permit carries a code of conduct that also bars serving students affiliated with the tutor's own school. That is press-reported rather than quoted from the policy document, so check the current ADEK text if you are in Abu Dhabi. A teacher from a different school, holding the permit, raises none of these questions.

What can a tutor legitimately do for an IB Internal Assessment?

A tutor may explain the published criteria, teach the underlying content, ask the questions that help a student narrow their own research question, teach how to structure an argument and present data, give feedback on a draft that names weaknesses without supplying the fix, and teach referencing. A tutor may not write or rewrite any part of it, supply the question or the data, or edit a draft to a finished state. The working test: is the next version still in the student's own sentences and traceable to the student's own thinking? If the tutor has typed into the document, it is not.

When do IB and IGCSE exams happen for students in the UAE?

Cambridge International runs IGCSE, O Level and International A Level exams in a June series and a November series; the February/March series is offered to India only and does not apply to UAE candidates. Pearson Edexcel International GCSE runs in May/June and November. Cambridge allocates each centre to one of six administrative zones and warns that the correct zone timetable must be used, as it cannot accept responsibility for a candidate who misses an exam otherwise. For IB session dates, confirm with your school's IB coordinator or ibo.org rather than any third-party site.

How do I know after six weeks whether tutoring is working?

Look at three things. First, a mark achieved under timed conditions — a past paper or school assessment done to time; if none exists after six weeks, that is the finding. Second, whether the kind of error has changed: good teaching moves a student from content errors to method errors to timing errors to careless ones. Third, whether your child can describe what they are working on and why. "We're doing past papers" is a holding answer; naming the specific thing being fixed is the sound of teaching having landed. If two of the three are weak, change the frequency, the focus or the tutor.

Is online IB tutoring as effective as a tutor in the room?

For most IB Diploma work, yes, and for some of it better — screen-shared past papers, marked work annotated live and a recording to revise from are hard to reproduce on a kitchen table. In-home has a real advantage where a younger child needs physical presence to stay on task, or where a student genuinely cannot work without someone beside them. The honest trade is travel: an in-home rate carries the tutor's commute inside it, and a late-afternoon crossing of Dubai reduces how much of your fee is teaching. Our home versus online comparison works the arithmetic through.

Should we start tutoring in DP1 or wait until the exam year?

Starting in DP1 is almost always cheaper and calmer, because the two things that decide a Diploma score — subject foundations and the Internal Assessment — are both built in the first year. By DP2, an IA that was planned badly is expensive to rescue and a content gap has to be closed alongside revision for everything else. The exception is a specific, bounded problem: one unit, one paper technique, one Extended Essay chapter. Those are well suited to a short block of sessions rather than an open-ended commitment, whenever they appear.

What happens if no UAE-based tutor covers my child's subject and level?

We tell you, and we say where the alternative tutor is based. Niche combinations — a less common Group 2 language, a specific HL option, a subject with few UAE teachers — do run out of local supply, and the honest response is disclosure rather than a vague "we'll match you soon". No competitor page we examined in this market discloses a coverage limit at all, and several conceal non-UAE delivery behind a local-looking contact number. Availability is always subject to tutor availability, and a clear "no" from us is more useful to you than a quiet yes.